Fall, with its harvest festivals, is the best time of the year to indulge in hometown delicacies. From harvest staples such as the New Mexico Hatch chile and Cape Cod oysters to locally-crafted beers and bourbons, there’s a culinary adventure awaiting your palate in just about every corner of the US. Here are nine food and drink festivals you don’t want to miss this fall.
Photo: Hawaiʻi Food & Wine Festival/
9 Food and Drink Festivals in the US to Attend This Fall
Santa Fe Wine & Chile Fiesta (Santa Fe, New Mexico)
- September 23–27, 2026
- Admission: Tickets are per event, starting around $100 per person
What started in 1991 as a one-day gathering of 20 restaurants now runs five days and draws around 4,500 people to eat and drink their way through New Mexico’s fall. Roughly 60 Santa Fe restaurants pour and plate alongside more than 90 wineries at cooking demos, winery dinners, and seminars across town. The real draw is chile: Chile Friday puts New Mexico’s defining crop at the center of a dedicated afternoon, and the closing Grand Tasting turns loose dozens of kitchens and pourers at once. Go for the pairing you can’t get anywhere else — a green-chile-forward plate next to a glass poured by the person who made the wine. Smaller events, from intimate wine dinners to sommelier seminars, are held around town during the preceding week.
Hawaiʻi Food & Wine Festival (Oahu/Hawaiʻi/Maui, Hawaiʻi)
Photo: Hawaiʻi Food & Wine Festival
- October 16–November 8, 2026
- Admission: Tickets are per event, starting around $150 for tastings
Co-founded in 2011 by Roy Yamaguchi and Alan Wong — two architects of Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine, the 1990s movement that pushed island kitchens to cook with local farmers and fishers instead of flying everything in — this festival spreads 11 ticketed events across three islands and three weekends, with nearly 100 chefs cooking under one rule: every dish uses ingredients grown, caught, or raised in Hawaiʻi. The bench is deep and TV-heavy, from Top Chef names like Sheldon Simeon and Michael Voltaggio to Michelin talent like Josiah Citrin and Jungsik Yim. You’ll find nationally known chefs working with taro, reef fish, and Kohala Coast beef from a few miles down the road. Money raised feeds Hawaiʻi’s culinary scholarships and agriculture programs, so the eating does double duty. The festival is spread between three islands, with one major weekend event per island, but you’ll find lots of local restaurants getting in on the action with special deals and promotions.
Fall for Greenville (Greenville, South Carolina)
Photo: Fall for Greenville
- October 9-11, 2026
- Admission: Free (fees for food and drink)
For one weekend, downtown Greenville closes Main Street and hands it over to food during Fall for Greenville. More than 50 local restaurants set up along the street with upwards of 250 dishes, from shrimp and grits to whatever the kitchens feel like showing off. Admission is free — you buy tickets for tastings and drinks — and around 150,000 people turn out over three days. Eighty-plus bands play six stages, there’s a beer and wine garden, and cooking demonstrations run throughout. It’s less a ticketed event than a citywide street party built around eating your way down one long avenue, which makes it an easy, low-commitment stop if you’re passing through the Upstate in October.
Bowling Green Bourbon and Brewfest (Bowling Green, Kentucky)
Photo: Bourbon & Brew Fest/
- September 10-13, 2026
- Admission: From $115 per person
An hour north of Nashville, this weekend festival takes over Bowling Green Ballpark (home field of the minor-league Hot Rods) and fills it with Kentucky bourbon and regional craft beer for an afternoon of sampling. It’s been running since 2014 and draws thousands of 21-and-over tasters who work through pours from distilleries and breweries around the state, with VIP options that add rarer bottles and early entry. Kentucky is the reason to go: you’re tasting bourbon at the source, in the state that makes most of the world’s supply, without the crowds or price tags of the big Louisville festivals. The Bourbon Trail runs within easy reach for the rest of the trip. For those serious about imbibing, check out the VIP experiences, including everything from early entry and catered food to private events and limited-run tastings.
Don’t want to drive? You can add shuttle access when you purchase your tickets, running between the festival venue and partner hotel.
Wellfleet OysterFest (Wellfleet, Massachusetts)
Photo: Lezi Rowell / Wellfleet Oyster Alliance
- October 17-18, 2026
- Admission: From $23 per person
Craft brews, music, and family-friendly activities are what you’d expect from a festival in this tight-knit Cape Cod town. But the local flavor truly comes out with the star of this show: oysters. Throughout the weekend, fresh catches are hauled to fuel the fest, and definitely expect raw oysters bars and rich New England chowders. There’s also shellfish farm tours, educational programs, and the annual Oyster Shuck-Off competition. After the festival, the town recycles its oyster shells, dumping them back into the ocean as building blocks for reef restoration. Close to 20,000 people attend over two days, so even though it’s a small town, it’s a big draw.
Arkansas Cornbread Festival (Little Rock, Arkansas)
- November 7, 2026
- Admission: Free, with tickets for tastings
Cornbread is the whole premise, and it holds up better than you’d expect. In Little Rock’s SoMa (South Main) district, home cooks and professional chefs go head-to-head in a competition split across traditional, sweet, and nontraditional categories, and a tasting ticket lets you sample the entries and cast a vote for your favorite. Admission is free, with live music, local makers, and neighborhood restaurants open along the route. Proceeds go to the Arkansas Foodbank, and organizers have leaned into a low-waste setup with refill stations and paper over plastic. Started in 2011, the festival is back on the calendar after a stretch away, making it a straightforward, one-day reason to build a fall weekend around a Southern staple.
The Original Terlingua International Championship Chili Cookoff (Terlingua, Texas)
Photo: Aastha Karki and Andrew Riefenstahl
- November 4-7, 2026
- Admission: From $80
This is the older of two rival cookoffs that split from a single Terlingua original and now run the same November weekend. This one — the Original Terlingua International Championship Chili Cook-Off, held behind the Terlingua Trading Company store, which is why regulars call it “Behind the Store” — traces directly to a 1967 stunt that launched competitive chili: Texas newspaper owner Frank X. Tolbert and cook Wick Fowler against New York writer H. Allen Smith. The contest famously ended in a draw. It runs over several days and peaks the first Saturday of November, pulling thousands to a near-ghost town on the edge of Big Bend National Park for chili (no beans, by rule), beer, music, and desert camping. Proceeds go to charity, with the ALS Association as the main beneficiary in honor of Fowler. The competing CASI championship happens the same weekend just outside town.
San Diego Beer Week (San Diego, California)
Photo: San Diego Brewers Guild
- November 3-12, 2026
- Admission: Tickets are by event, priced TBD
San Diego calls itself the Capital of Craft, and its ten-day Beer Week each November is the case for the title: 150-plus independent breweries pouring across a county that helped define the West Coast IPA. Rather than one central event, the week runs on the breweries themselves — tap takeovers, rare releases, collaboration pours, and pairing dinners spread across town, from the Miramar brewing corridor to North Park’s walkable strip of taprooms. Go for the concentration and the range: you can taste your way through one neighborhood on foot in an afternoon, then move to another the next day. The Brewers Guild’s big standalone tasting, the Capital of Craft Beer Fest, is worth catching, too. It brings a few dozen local breweries in one place for unlimited pours, food, and music, though it now runs on its own in September rather than as the Beer Week kickoff like it once was. The festival overlaps with the San Diego Bay Wine & Food Festival, running November 6-8, 2026.
Chicago Gourmet (Chicago, Illinois)
Photo: Chicago Gourmet Press Room/James Vitullo
- September 24-27, 2026
- Admission: Tickets are by event, from $39
Chicago’s kitchens have piled up dozens of James Beard awards, and for one late-September weekend the city puts its chefs on a rooftop above Millennium Park. Running since 2008, Chicago Gourmet is a ticketed, 21-and-over food-and-wine event built around separate marquee sessions rather than one big tent: an opening Tacos & Tequila night hosted by Rick Bayless, a Hamburger Hop burger battle, and the main Grand Cru tasting, where 30-plus chefs plate alongside sommeliers and spirits makers. The draw is the roster, with names you’d know from Top Chef and Food Network, cooking a few feet away and often working the tongs themselves. You can buy tickets for single events, or full travel packages. 