A pool party, plenty of honey pie, and $2,000,000 to help restaurant workers

Dear Pros,

Erika here. Back in February, when I started the job as restaurant editor, Food & Wine's editor in chef Chris Shepherd asked me if I was familiar with the food festival that he and Lindsey Brown, Southern Smoke Foundation's executive director, orchestrate each year in Houston. Not really, I replied, unless you count the photos that 2011 F&W Best New Chef Jamie Bissonnette posted from last year's pool party.

Fast-forward nine months later, and I got to experience every moment of Southern Smoke Festival, which took place this past weekend, starting with a ride from the Houston airport to the hotel, during which my Uber driver told me that I was lucky to be arriving during a cold front. I checked my phone. It was 88 degrees, with a 90% humidity level. Chris texted me a nine-minute Slim Thug song, "Welcome 2 Houston," to play on the way in.

Over the next 72 hours, nearly 100 of the country's most celebrated chefs — including 2017 F&W Best New Chef Nina Compton, Aaron Franklin, and Chris Bianco — descended on the city and joined forces with local talent for a nonstop schedule of eating, pool partying, and cooking an outrageous lineup of food for ticketholders at Saturday's festival to raise money for the Southern Smoke Foundation.

The festival also marked the first time that the 2026 class of F&W Best New Chefs cooked together for a crowd, and they knocked it out of the park. Hannah and Zachary Welton of Welton's Tiny Bakeshop in Charleston, South Carolina, passed out hundreds of slices of honey pie with buttermilk whipped cream. Rishi Kumar of Mirra and Mariela in Chicago dished up a zingy tom yum aguachile using Peruvian scallops served in their shells. Carlos Delgado of Causa in Washington, D.C., somehow fit an octopus-shaped mold in his carry-on to create one of the festival's most photographed bites: a Peruvian potato causa topped with grilled octopus anticuchero and finished with an inky, octopus-shaped tuile made with black garlic. Houston's own Lucas McKinney was the ultimate host at his Gulf Coast seafood restaurant Josephine's, generously feeding industry crowds biscuits and crabs and shrimp po'boys all weekend long.

On Saturday night, Chris and Lindsey revealed that the massive shebang, attended by roughly 4,000 people, had raised $2 million for the Southern Smoke Foundation. This will further fuel its mission to provide emergency grants and no-cost mental health care to restaurant workers across the country. It was an impressive testament to the group's unwavering commitment to their cause. Ten years ago, the first Southern Smoke Festival raised $180,000, with 7 participating chefs. Now, the foundation issues around that much in grants every two weeks.

As I heard Chris tell a group of chefs earlier this year, taking the first step is everything. You've got to stand at the edge of the pond and jam a foot into the water — otherwise, that wave will never start.

Onward,
Erika

P.S. We're less than a week away from the first-ever Best New Chefs Supper Club on Wednesday, October 14. 2026 F&W Best New Chef Masako Morishita is cooking a dynamite five-course meal with 2017 F&W Best New Chefs Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson at their outstanding Los Angeles restaurant, Kismet. Grab the last couple of tickets right here.