PALM BEACH | FLORIDA

Lindsay Autry, David Sabin, and the Four-Day Feast Palm Beach Waits For All Year

By Eric Barton | Sept. 8, 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.

No matter how famous she gets, no matter the awards and the accolades, Lindsay Autry is always still that North Carolina kid showing hogs at the county fair and picking peaches seven days a week on her grandfather’s orchard. It doesn’t matter the Food Network shows she wins or even, more importantly nowadays, the fact that she’s one of the stars you expect to see when Palm Beach turns into a four-day dinner party.

The Palm Beach Food & Wine Festival returns for its 18th year December 11–14, a county-wide sprint of 22 events that range from buttoned-up dinners to poolside walk-arounds. The festival partners with Wine Spectator and ends with the Grand Tasting, where the pours are serious and the energy is end-of-semester giddy.

For all its polish, the engine is still a two-person act: festival director David Sabin and Autry—“He is the creative dream maker and I am the logistics unicorn,” she told me—dividing and conquering the hundred tiny choices that make service look effortless.

Autry, right, at the Grand Tasting

Autry has been around since the scrappy days, when the whole thing was “just a one-night evening on Worth Avenue.” Growth came fast. This year brings new toys—a first-ever walk-around at Oceano and a daytime “Par-Tee at The Park”—alongside returning favorites. Autry’s circle-the-date pick is Bubbles & Bites: A Yacht Rock Experience, which she’s hosting and cooking for. She’ll be in her own kitchen with a cast that reads like a culinary group text: Sarah Grueneberg, the Forgione family, Joe Flamm, Stephen Stryjewski, Mason Hereford, and, for the first time, Chris Shepherd.

PBFWF 2024 Lunch at Cafe Chardonnay

She and Sabin work on the festival year-round. That means Autry is toggling between front-of-house smiles and back-of-house spreadsheets more than most people realize. It also explains the tone: yes, world-class chefs, but also the looseness that happens when pros cook for an audience that actually wants to eat. And there’s a purpose baked in—each year a portion of proceeds goes to the Els for Autism Foundation, which Autry calls an honor to support in her own backyard.

Palm Beach Food & Wine Festival Real Food Revolution

Last year’s Real Food Revolution breakfast

If she were attending purely for fun, Autry’s weekend plan sounds like the itinerary your foodie friend texts you at 7 a.m.: start with a Thursday dinner like Spice at Stage; hit Friday’s Chef Welcome Party; a daytime party at The Park on Saturday; and close out at the Grand Tasting, where 50-plus restaurants and 100-plus wines (curated by Wine Spectator) send everyone home happy.

Dessert from last year’s dinner at Polpo

Autry’s own cooking still carries the DNA of those early tomato pies—Southern comfort with a light, Mediterranean touch. Lately she’s been channeling that blend into a new project up the coast: three concepts at the Westin Jekyll Island in Georgia—Willet’s Lowcountry, Pour Tabby, and Salty’s—built on local seafood and ingredients. “We focus on a light approach of Mediterranean cuisine with coastal Southern influences,” she told me. “You can even find a version of tomato pie there.”

David Sabin and Lindsay Autry at the Chef After Party

Sabin and Autry at the Chef After Party

That’s the through line with Autry and with this festival: start small, sweat the details, invite good people in. The rest follows—music, clinking glasses, a December crowd drifting from station to station, and Autry moving between the pass and the podium like that’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.