Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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Green Never Tasted So Good [Attending The Tampa Bay Wine & Food Festival]

Posted May 16, 2009 by Jeff Houck

Updated May 16, 2009 at 09:28 AM

So the third incarnation of the Tampa Bay Wine & Food Festival is underway. Yesterday’s invitation-only trade and media day was a bit of a perspirationpalooza. (Dear God, it’s Jeff. Would it kill you to not block the breeze with a giant pink hotel?) But still, the event was very nicely attended.

It was good to see some bodies there. Last year’s trade day was a bit sparse. And, as I wrote on Friday, the economy isn’t helping with restaurant participation or ticket sales this year:

Restaurants are going under. Wine and spirits makers are watching profits drip away.

It’s not a great time to keep a glamorous beach-front food festival afloat.

Organizers of this weekend’s Tampa Bay Wine & Food Festival say they planned the third year of the event behind the Don CeSar Resort on St. Pete Beach with pinched wallets and bottom lines in mind.

Hosted by Southern Wine & Spirits of Central Florida, the festival is billed as “the most exotic wine and food event of the year.”

But the chef’s golf tournament, lavish black tie gala, champagne Bubble Bash and “titanium chef” challenge of previous years are all gone. What once was a four-day extravaganza has been pared to two afternoons of tasting and sipping.

“I don’t know how socially responsible it is to try to keep 18 or 19 events going at a time when people are trying to decide how to make the mortgage payment,” festival director Tonya Valdez of Southern Wine said.

“Because we service the businesses who are participating, we hear every day how hard it is,” Valdez said. “People like to think wine and spirits are recession-proof, but we’re taking the hit because our customers are taking one, too.”

At a time when extravagance seems gauche, the event instead will aim for a message with meaning – specifically, promoting the idea of environmentally friendly food.

The grand tasting tent, where 400 wine labels and three dozen restaurant and food providers will showcase their flavors, will act as the festival’s centerpiece, complete with a Garden of Eden featuring a tastefully adorned Adam and Eve.

This would be the Eve in question:

Yes. Well. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…

It was a bit of a mosh pit on Friday as people angled for food and beverage. Didn’t help that the grand tasting tent is roughly 90 feet shorter in length this year. One purveyor, Dave Katz of Zyr vodka, didn’t have a table when he showed up. Organizers quickly found him one at the north end of the tent.

A cool aspect to this year’s festival is that there are demo kitchens set up in an adjunct part of the grand tasting tent. Yesterday, Chad Johnson, exec chef at SideBern’s in Tampa, gave a demo on cooking using sustainable seafood. SideBern’s somellier Kevin Pelley provided the multiple wine pairings for Johnson’s dishes.

Johnson served a tapas-sized sardine dish as a way of showing that, although an oily fish, fresh sardines are flavorful fish that are far from the heavy-aroma offerings Americans know when eaten from the can.

Plus, as Johnson pointed out, they’re one of the most sustainable fisheries on the planet because they spawn six or seven times a year. And unlike larger fish like salmon, for example, there is less comparable waste.

Johnson also did an almond-crusted halibut with a milk-based sea urchin sauce that was outstanding. Although halibut is a larger fish, it can be harvested by single hook, as is done in Alaska. East Coast fishermen tend to scrape the bottom for the fish, so buyers will want to support the Alaskan-caught product. (Bad fishermen, bad!)

Shoes? Not required. Not even encouraged, really. Walking through the sugar sand behind the Don is like doing StairMaster with a wine glass in your hand.

There are times when the festival gets a little too hip for itself - it tries to glom a little of the gloss from it’s sister event, the Godzilla-sized South Beach Wine & Food Festival - but it’s not as pronounced as it was during previous years. There are lots of places to sit and chill, if you get there early. South Beach could use a little more of that. This one is far more Tampa’s speed.

Tickets? They’re a bit pricey at $77 a pop ($102 for VIP tix), but proceeds go to Moffit Cancer Center and the Abilities Foundation.

If you go to the festival’s Web site and sign up for the newsletter, you can get $25 off a VIP ticket.

For a gallery of more photos from yesterday, click here.

FYI: I’m heading back to the festival today for the grand tasting from noon to 4 p.m. I’ll be posting updates on my Twitter blog.