Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
TASTE FORT LAUDERDALE
City gets share of South Beach food festival events.
“This should have happened years ago. We’ve run out of space on the beach [in Miami Beach].” Lee Brian Schrager, festival founder
The precocious teen has turned Sweet 16 and outgrown its party dress. So once again, the South Beach Wine and Food Festival will invade Fort Lauderdale for its annual foodie smorgasbord. For the second straight year, a full slate of events will take place in Broward County, including the festival-opening Seaside Eats soiree at the Bonnet House in Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday.
Hosted by chef and Food Network host Anne Burrell, Seaside Eats will be the first of seven events taking place in Broward during the 16th annual festival, which runs Wednesday through Sunday.
“It’s a natural progression,” says Lee Brian Schrager, the festival’s founder and director, who spent his teenage years in Sunrise and held his first food jobs in Fort Lauderdale. “This should have happened years ago. We’ve run out of space on the beach [in Miami Beach].”
Among the Taste Fort Lauderdale events: a return of the Bloody Mary Brunch ($175) at the Fort Lauderdale Ritz-Carlton on Sunday, co-hosted by actors Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka, and the launch of a Friday-night cocktail event in artsy Fat Village, DRINK Fort Lauderdale ($95), on Friday.
“We love being part of it,” says Fort Lauderdale restaurateur Tim Petrillo, whose S3 restaurant on the beach will host a dinner with chef and Food Network personality Marc Murphy on Thursday ($250). “It keeps growing.”
S3, run by Petrillo’s the Restaurant People, was the guinea pig for Fort Lauderdale’s involvement, holding its first festival event in 2015, the only one in Broward that year. Schrager says he was pleased with the seven Fort Lauderdale events staged last year.
Most of the 90-event festival’s biggest gatherings will still be clustered in an area along the southern sands of Miami Beach, including the ever-popular Burger Bash (Friday) and Grand Tasting Village (Saturday and Sunday).
But Fort Lauderdale has become part of the permanent picture. Events will take place every night, including a dinner Thursday with chef Amanda Freitag and Angelo Elia at Elia’s Casa D’Angelo ($250), a Friday clambake ($250) with Geoffrey Zakarian, Valerie Bertinelli and Debi Mazar at Zakarian’s new Point Royal restaurant that recently opened at the Hollywood Diplomat Resort, and a Saturday North Carolina Sisterhood dinner at Burlock Coast at the Ritz-Carlton ($25) hosted by three North Carolina chefs, including Vivian Howard, who hosts the popular Peabody Award-winning PBS series “A Chef ’s Life.”
Petrillo says the festival raises Fort Lauderdale’s culinary profile nationally. “Around 30 percent of the people who came to last year’s dinner at S3 weren’t from South Florida,” Petrillo says. He also says it eventually may spur migration from sous chefs and others who work at high-end restaurants around the country when they want to launch their own ventures.
“If you’re a sous chef at a place in Boston, and you leave 25-degree weather to sip Champagne across the beach and it’s 75 degrees, you might think, ‘This isn’t such a bad place to open a restaurant,’ ” Petrillo says.