The scene at last year's Cebu Food and Wine Festival. Jeeves de Veyra
CEBU -- Last year, the Cebu Food and Wine Festival (CFWF) organizers made a bold promise to keep on making the upcoming festivals progressively bigger and more ambitious.
It seems that they’ve kept their promise with this year's calendar of activities that features more events, more venues, more chefs, and a lot more food.
The Cebu Food and Wine Festival has come a long way since the first one that opened in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdowns. While the first one started as a way to keep the Cebu hospitality industry afloat during the most trying of times, it has pivoted to showcasing the best of Cebu restaurants and has now even gone further to promote food stamping.
“Food stamping is taking regional ingredients found on the land, and we bring in chefs that have master artisan skill set to take it to a new level,” explained CFWF chairwoman Kate Dychangco Anzani.
Anzani cited the ground doe patty as an example of food stamping where the female goat meat is taken from Dauis, Bohol with Balamban mountain beans, aged cheese from Davao, black garlic from Ilocos, and beetroot from Nature’s Best farms. All of the ingredients are given provenance and can be traced back to the region of origin.
The festival brings together the culinary rock stars of Cebu, Manila, and even chefs as far as Dubai to bring this vision to the plate. Kitchen dream teams will be taking over the restaurants around Cebu and Mactan, with some extension events happening in Bohol and Dumaguete.
The festival formally starts on June 3 with the grand tasting event that is traditionally held at Crimson Resort and Spa in Mactan. Restaurants and hotels around Cebu will have special one-off events featuring guest chefs, and special menus and buffets that will throughout the festival all the way to the 14-hands dinner to close the festival at J Park Island Resort Waterpark.
Besides these special events, the guest chefs will be developing entrees that highlight food stamping and will be added to the menus of the host restaurants even after the festival closes this year.
For more information, please check out the festival website.