FORT LAUDERDALE | FLORIDA

Visit Lauderdale Food & Wine Festival 2026 Brings Celebrity Chefs, 100-Plus Tastings, and Beachside Events

By Eric Barton | Oct. 31, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

The Visit Lauderdale Food & Wine Festival is not subtle about its ambitions anymore. For 2026, what began as a local showcase has turned into a takeover of Fort Lauderdale’s restaurants, beaches, breweries, rooftops, distilleries, and yoga mats.

Over the week of January 19 through January 25, Broward County turns into one long progressive dinner with celebrity chefs, Michelin-recognized kitchens, and the kind of VIP tasting lounges that require wristbands and a moral flexibility about lunch versus “second lunch.”

The festival is now in its seventh year, and the scale tells you exactly where Broward County thinks it belongs in Florida’s food conversation. The lineup pulls in national names — Richard Blais, Eddie Jackson, Nancy Fuller, Jason Smith, Clarice Lam, Ron “Captain Ron” Dimpflmaier, Remy Powell, and Dario Stephen — and drops them into beachside demo tents, barbecue cook-offs, bao workshops, and brunch.

The local talent shares the stage, which is the point. Fort Lauderdale is no longer just the place Miami chefs visit on their night off. It is producing (and importing) Michelin-noticed restaurants and James Beard–nominated talent, and then putting them shoulder-to-shoulder in public.

Rino Cerbone

10 One-Night-Only Menus

The backbone of the week is the dinner series, which this year sprawls into 10 one-night collaborations across the county. Heritage, the Fort Lauderdale restaurant with a Michelin Bib Gourmand nod, opens the festival with chef Rino Cerbone on January 19.

From there it turns into a tour of what South Florida cooking looks like right now. Ukiah Japanese Smokehouse links up with Miami favorite Macchialina for a Japanese-meets-Italian menu from chefs Michael Lewis and Michael Pirolo. Evelyn’s teams with Auro, pairing a Michelin-recommended coastal kitchen in Fort Lauderdale with a Michelin-starred chef from California. There is even a beer-and-food pairing dinner at 26 Degree Brewing in Pompano Beach for people who believe a brewer should be as famous as a chef.

Every dinner is built as a one-off. Menus won’t repeat. Seating is limited. This is the part of the festival for people who treat reservations like sport.

Eddie Jackson

The Grand Tasting: 100+ Bites, One Beach

If you want the big, public spectacle, that happens Saturday. The Grand Tasting, on January 24 at Las Olas Oceanside Park, is the festival’s all-hands moment.

General admission gets you more than 100 food and drink tastings, DJ energy, and live cooking demos from Richard Blais, Eddie Jackson, and Ron Dimpflmaier. VIP gets you in an hour earlier, into a shaded lounge with its own food and drink situation, which sounds minor until you remember this is outdoors in South Florida and shade is the real luxury amenity.

This is also where you see, in one lawn, what Fort Lauderdale is trying to say about itself: that it can put national TV talent next to local names and nobody looks out of place.

Nancy Fuller

Signature Events: Pick Your Personality

The festival’s nightly marquees are basically a mood board for how you like to eat.

On Thursday, January 22, Wok ’n Roll sets up at the Las Olas Intracoastal Promenade with Asian-inspired dishes from chefs led by Clarice Lam and live music, because someone finally realized night markets are more fun with a soundtrack.

On Friday, January 23, BBQ at the Beach moves in with Jason Smith and Dimpflmaier, plus an actual barbecue showdown, because this is still Florida and someone is leaving with bragging rights.

Sunday, January 25, splits into two lanes. Beachside Brunch is the ocean-view, grown-up end of the weekend, hosted by Nancy Fuller with a guest appearance from Eddie Jackson.

The Visit Lauderdale Food & Wine Festival 2026

Classes, Labs, and Other Ways to Claim This Was “Educational”

Between those tentpole events is everything the Visit Lauderdale Food & Wine Festival quietly does better than most Florida food weekends: classes.

You can learn how to pair pizza and beer at Gulf Stream Brewery. You can make fresh pasta, bao, and layered cakes. You can sit in on a bourbon cooking class where the menu runs from bacon-wrapped dates to petite filet mignon. You can taste through sparkling wines, natural wines, and tiki cocktails in seminars run by sommeliers and bartenders who live in this market year-round.

Then there’s Flow & Feast, which is yoga, a sound bath, plant-based bites, organic wine, and a gallery setting, for anyone who wants to say they went to a wellness experience and not “another tasting.”

These are small-group, hands-on sessions, and they read like the part of the week locals will keep talking about after the tourists fly home.

The 2026 Visit Lauderdale Food & Wine Festival

Not Just South Florida’s Other Food Festival

If you live in South Florida, the week is basically a challenge: How many of these can you realistically do and still claim you “don’t really go east of Federal anymore.” If you’re visiting, this is the pitch in one sentence. Fort Lauderdale is not Miami lite.

Fort Lauderdale is attempting to run its own play now: ramen and natural wine in Wilton Manors, coastal fish dinners in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, steakhouse tastings with serious cellar pairings, and a brunch lawn where the ocean is the backdrop. All of it lands January 19–25, 2026, and most of it will not repeat.