South Beach Wine and Food Festival 2021 guide to tickets, celebrities, COVID-sniffing dogs

To gain admission inside Miami-Dade’s biggest celebrity-studded bash since Super Bowl 2020 – South Beach Wine and Food Festival 2021 – festivalgoers must first pass a key smell test: COVID-sniffing dogs.

Canines trained to detect COVID-19 symptoms, the same ones enlisted for Miami Heat games, will weave through crowds of spectators at the roving culinary feast returning May 20-23, festival organizer Lee Brian Schrager says. Visitors will encounter temperature checks and be asked to wear masks and even fill out COVID questionnaires.

“If the dogs sniff you out and detect something you’ll have to do a rapid test at our expense,” Schrager says. “We did everything we could possibly do legally to show our commitment to safety without annoying the governor.”

“We just have to keep pivoting until we get our way,” says Schrager, whose bash was originally scheduled for February until he postponed it to May. “That’s all we do these days: pivot, pivot, pivot.”

The kickoff 20th Anniversary Celebration at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach, a food event on May 20 hosted by Martha Stewart and nightclub mogul David Grutman with a performance by the Chainsmokers, is sold out. Tickets went on sale Tuesday for a foodless Chainsmokers performance ($150) with theater-style seating at 10:45 p.m., following the celebration.

This year the festival’s name and focus remains “South Beach,” with fewer culinary events than usual – just four – spilling over into Broward and Palm Beach counties. With a smaller lineup and an attendance capped at 25,000 (one-third its usual size), the festival will feature 74 gut-bursting gatherings (instead of 111 in 2020) led by big-name chefs and Food Network personalities Guy Fieri and Giada De Laurentiis, Thomas Keller and Bobby Flay, Martha Stewart, rapper-producer Pharrell Williams and even rock icon Sammy Hagar.

In Broward and Palm Beach, there will be five events, starting with a 7 p.m. May 20 outdoor-indoor tour of the buzzy Delray Beach Market food hall (33 SE Third Ave., Delray Beach) with “MasterChef” Season 10 finalist Nick DiGiovanni. That will be followed by a 7 p.m. May 21 Fort Lauderdale dinner at Riviera by Fabio Viviani (525 S. Fort Lauderdale Beach Blvd.) with Viviani and celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito; a 7 p.m. May 21 dinner at Etaru Hallandale (111 S. Surf Road) with California chef Jet Tila (“Beat Bobby Flay,” “Guy’s Grocery Games”) and Etaru head chef Davide D’Agostino; Hallandale Beach Food & Groove at 5 p.m. May 22, a 21-and-older gathering of wine, spirits and bites at Village at Gulfstream Pegasus Park (901 N. Federal Highway, Hallandale Beach); and Goya Foods’ Fun and Fit as a Family bash 11 a.m. May 22 and 11 a.m. May 23 at Peter Bluesten Park (501 SE First Ave., Hallandale Beach).

So far, the festival’s smaller footprint has steered strong ticket sales, Schrager says. The Hallandale and Fort Lauderdale dinners are sold out, and a quarter of the Delray Beach passes remain. The outdoor-only intimate dinners and medium-size gatherings, such as the Oyster Bash at Nikki Beach (4 p.m. May 21), have outsold big gatherings such as the Guy Fieri-hosted BubbleQ (5:30 and 9 p.m. May 22), Heineken Burger Bash (5:30 and 9 p.m. May 21) and Grand Tasting Village (11 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. May 22-23). (These large events still have tickets available.)

“We had no idea what the appetite would be but it seems like we couldn’t have timed it better,” Schrager says. “We were the last event before COVID hit last year and now we’re the first big food event since COVID.”