What To Expect From This Year's Food & Wine Classic in Aspen

Vintage-style marquee letter lights make the perfect Food & Wine selfie station.

This year’s Food & Wine Classic in Aspen will highlight tastes from around the world—and the chefs who are elevating and evolving the cuisine.

Summer 2023 marks the 40th anniversary of the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, an event that has grown from a small wine tasting with 300 attendees in 1983 to a three-day culinary extravaganza. Some 4,000 ticket holders gather under white tents to sip, taste and schmooze over food and drinks from world-class chefs, wine and spirits connoisseurs, and culinary celebrities.

To celebrate the 40-year milestone, this event will focus on innovators and icons. Bobby Flay will be back, joining icons like Guy Fieri and Andrew Zimmern. The Classic will look back with moments paying homage to legendary F&W headliners like Julia Child, Jacques Pépin and Marcella Hazan. But it’ll look forward, too, shining a spotlight on industry innovators like Claudette Zepeda, known for her bold approach to regional Mexican cuisine, and Wanda Mann, founder of the blog Wine with Wanda.

Francis Lam, host of The Splendid Table, will live-tape his NPR podcast at the Food & Wine Classic in June.

This summer’s lineup is a reflection of the evolution of global cuisine. “American food has always been a culmination of what happens when you have people from different cultures coming together in one place,” says award-winning food writer Francis Lam, host of NPR’s The Splendid Table, which will be live-taped at the Food & Wine Classic. However, for years the status quo was that French or European cuisine was considered high-end and everything else was relegated to second tier. “You’d see it in city newspapers—European fine-dining restaurants would get a full review. Then they’d cover the rest of the food from the rest of the planet in a column called ‘cheap eats,’” Lam says. “We’re coming to the point where we’re recognizing that cuisine from all over the world is worthy of sharing the same table. We can open our minds and enjoy an amazingly crafted dish that happens to be from Senegal or Ethiopia.”

Lam also sees a shifted focus toward freedom and imagination in cooking. “The ideal situation is that we recognize these chefs, but we’re not pigeonholing them into doing only facsimiles of the food of their heritage,” he says. Chefs should be able to be inventive, while respecting the origins of the cuisine. “Hopefully we’re moving beyond those rigid structures and just letting people tell their stories.”

Marcus Samuelsson

Swediopian pizza at Hav & Mar combines smoked salmon, fennel, dill cream and berbere spread

At the Food & Wine Classic this summer, Marcus Samuelsson, an iconic chef who was born in Ethiopia and raised by a Swedish family in Sweden, will headline two cooking seminars that will explore the evolution of the chef. “When Samuelsson first came to the U.S. as a hotshot young chef, he was cooking modern avant-garde Swedish food,” Lam says. “Only after becoming an icon did he start to really explore the cuisine of the African diaspora.” His cuisine? “Swediopian.”

Samuelsson learned the basics of cooking from his grandmother, Helga, and evolved his art by traveling and working in Switzerland, France, Japan and New York. His new restaurant in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, Hav & Mar, is an incarnation of the Swediopian idea. Hav is a Swedish word for “ocean,” and Mar is Ethiopian for “honey.”

“The beautiful thing about living in America is that you can be duo. My Black experience is nonmonolithic,” says chef Marcus Samuelsson. “People, particularly people of color, we all have mixed journeys.”

Earlier in his career, Samuelsson used ancient Ethiopian spices like berbere and Ethiopian butters, but he says he didn’t highlight them. “Maybe they were the hidden ingredient, something in the background—like a musical note,” he says. “Now, we live in a time where I can fully share those with our customers.”

Samuelsson points out that the evolution of cuisine has followed the evolution of media. In the network TV days, food conversations revolved only around French and European food. Eventually, the media took notice of other cuisines like Japanese, Mexican and Peruvian. Today, social media is pushing the progression. “With Instagram and TikTok, you broadcast your own story,” Samuelsson says. “It makes things like Swediopian or Jamaican Filipino possible. It’s the evolution of who we are.”

Kenji López-Alt

Author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, Kenji López-Alt grew up in New York in a multicultural family. His mother is a first-generation Japanese immigrant and his father hails from rural Pennsylvania. “I grew up eating a mix of Japanese home cooking, Betty Crocker-style American food, and whatever the New York Times was publishing.” His affinity for Chinese and Chinese-American cuisine stems from his dad, who loved eating out in Chinatown in New York and Boston. At MIT, López-Alt cooked for the college’s International House. “Each week, I’d spend time with one of the house members learning about a food from their home, working with them on a menu that we’d serve on Sunday,” says López-Alt. It exposed him to a range of cuisines and inspired a lifelong interest in learning about other cultures through their food.

“There’s no better way to learn about people than to break bread with them,” says chef and author Kenji López-Alt, who will present a seminar at the Food & Wine Classic titled “Serious Eats Presents the Flavor of Fire: Wok Cooking at Home.”

“Kenji never self-identified as a Japanese chef,” Lam says. “He’s just a really curious cook. He’s sort of this polyglot.” In Aspen, López-Alt is fired up to share his favorite kitchen tool: the wok. “I’m really excited to show the breadth of techniques you can use with it.” And he plans to bust myths about the wok: It’s not just for stir-frying, and you don’t need a powerful restaurant-style burner to cook in it effectively.

STRAIGHT UP SIPPERS

In the 40 years that the Food & Wine Classic has been coming to Aspen, the event’s beverage program has evolved. Although the event has featured spirits in the past, wine has always been at the forefront. Following trends over time, the Classic has run seminars on “cult” cabernet sauvignons, Rieslings and natural wines from biodynamically farmed grapes.

Nate Ganapathi

This summer, innovation in the drinks space will be reflected in the speaker lineup as interest grows in sipping high-end spirits. Tequila, agave and whiskey aren’t just for crafting cocktails. “Over the past few years, there’s been such interest in brown spirits—bourbon and rye, particularly—and in agave-based spirits that it seemed like the right time to revisit them in seminars, not just in the big tent,” says Ray Isle, Food & Wine magazine’s executive wine editor. “Bourbon seminars were a huge hit last year—quite a change from 10 or 12 years ago!”

During the Classic, watch for a seminar on agave beyond margaritas by Alba Huerta, whose Houston cocktail bar, Julep, received the James Beard award in 2022. Jaime Salas, a seasoned agave distillates expert, will present a seminar on aged tequila. And Nate Ganapathi, the founder of Bevridge and owner of Whisky Live, will present several seminars—on American whiskeys, Irish whiskeys and single malts.

Other drink highlights at the Classic: Most of Food & Wine’s 2023 Drinks Innovators of the Year will be pouring at the Grand Tasting. “We try to identify and honor people who are really shaking things up in the drinks space,” Isle says. Look out for Ntsiki Biyela, the first Black woman winemaker in South Africa, and Jake Bullock and Luke Anderson, who are at the forefront of the cannabis-based beverage movement with their brand Cann.

Kristen Kish

Born in Korea, Kristen Kish was adopted into a family in Kentwood, Michigan. “Growing up, she wasn’t particularly steeped in Korean cuisine or culture,” Lam says. She attended Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago and became a fine-dining chef in the European mold, working as chef de cuisine for Barbara Lynch at Stir, a demonstration kitchen in Boston. “Now she’s finding her story,” Lam says.

Kristen Kish

In 2018, the Top Chef winner launched her first restaurant, Arlo Grey, located in Austin, Texas, where her cuisine melds French and Italian inspiration with nostalgic dishes from her Midwest upbringing. At the Classic, she’ll present the seminar “Korean–Ish: Comforting Midwestern Dishes with a Korean Twist.” Kish is insightful about global cuisine. “I think in the food world, there’s been this term ‘exotic cuisine’ thrown around, which really bothers me,” the chef recently told Kerry Nolan on the podcast All of It.“I think it implies that something is not normal, but it is normal to somebody. I love trying new things because I think that really sparks inspiration.”