Houston's best food festival

Houston's Southern Smoke Festival fires up loaded 2024 lineup of star chefs

Houston’s biggest food festival is returning for 2024 with another lineup featuring more than 50 chefs from Texas and beyond. The Southern Smoke Festival returns to Discovery Green on Saturday, October 5 with a number of innovations to make it an even more memorable experience.

As always, the event is loaded with James Beard Award winners, Food & Wine Best New Chef alumni, reality TV favorites, and some of America’s most talented pitmasters. The event raises money for the Southern Smoke Foundation, the non-profit that Houston chef Chris Shepherd and his wife Lindsey Brown started to provide cash assistance and mental health care to hospitality workers. To date, the foundation's Emergency Relief Fund has distributed more than $11 million to recipients nationwide.

The event aims to build on the success of last year’s two-day festival that raised $1.8 million and last month’s wine-focused Decanted event that raised $700,000.

New this year is a special area dedicated to the 2024 Food & Wine Best New Chefs class that will be revealed in September. Shepherd, a member of the 2013 BNC class, tells CultureMap that he sees the festival as an opportunity for these rising star chefs to get to know each and begin building important professional relationships.

“It’s trying to set the groundwork for them as a group to learn about each other and maybe meet some other new people,” he says. “It’s a nurturing process. You want them to learn about each other. We felt like it was a good thing to do with the BNCs.”

Also new this year is a culinary stage that will host cooking demonstrations. The headliner is Christina Tosi, the superstar pastry chef behind Milk Bar. Other participants include Top Chef winner Brooke Williamson, acclaimed pitmaster Pat Martin, and star chefs from New Orleans and Austin, including Ana Castro, Fermin Nunez, Mason Hereford, Kevin Fink, and Tavel Bristol-Joseph.

“It’s a different interaction for people to have,” Shepherd says. “Maybe if you get tired of eating, you take a break, grab a drink. You can watch someone cook something. It gives people multiple things to do throughout the day.”

Finally, nine wine bars from Houston and beyond will pour their favorite selections. Local participants include 13 Celsius, Lees Den, Montrose Cheese & Wine, Stella’s Wine Bar, and The Library.

Of course, the core of the event remains the same — a tasting served by Shepherd and his fellow Beard Award winners, including Aaron Franklin (Franklin BBQ), Ashley Christensen (Raleigh, NC), Jason Stanhope (Charleston, SC), and Sarah Grueneberg (Chicago). They’re joined by a number of chefs from across the country, including Top Chef: Masters winner Chris Cosentino, Top Chef fan favorite Lee Anne Wong, and star pitmaster Rodney Scott.

Austin chefs are also well represented. In addition to Franklin and the chefs leading demonstrations, the roster includes Chelsea Fadda (Pecan Square Cafe), Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel (Birdie’s), and Beard Award winner Edgar Rico (Nixta Taqueria).

As always, Houston chefs are enthusiastic participants. Returning locals include Ope Amosu (ChopnBlok), Tastemaker Award winner Aaron Bludorn (Bludorn), Leonard Botello IV (Truth BBQ), Food & Wine Best New Chef Emmanuel Chavez (Tatemo), Tastemaker Award winner Abbas Dhanani (Burger Bodega), Tastemaker Award winners Quy Hoang/Robin Wong/Terry Wong/Arash Kharat (Blood Bros. BBQ), Beard Award winner Benchawan Painter (Street to Kitchen), Ryan Pera (Coltivare), Tastemaker Award winner Martin Stayer (Nobie’s), and current Top Chef contestant Michelle Wallace (b’tween the slices). Houston chefs joining the festival for the first time include Tastemaker Award winners Lucas McKinney (Jospehine’s) and Don Nguyen (Khoi Barbecue) as well as Austin Simmons (Tris).

VIP ticket holders get a few exclusive bites prepared by Kate McLean (Tony’s), Paola Velez (Bodega Bakes, Dōekï Dōekï, Washington, DC), and Billy Durney, who will be serving the acclaimed burgers from his restaurant Red Hill Tavern.

Tickets go on sale July 9 at $225 for general admission and $500 for VIP, which comes with early admission, a dedicated VIP area, and other perks. For the ultimate experience, sponsor a local or visiting chef for $5,000 or $10,000, respectively.

The event raised $1.8 million.

Photo by Emily Jaschke

Last year's event raised $1.8 million.

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What's Eric Eating Episodes 523 and 524

Acclaimed Austin duo dish on their wine-obsessed neighborhood restaurant

Birdie's Arjav Ezekiel Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel

Photo by Mackenzie Smith Kelly

Birdie's owners Arjav Ezekiel and chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel are this week's guests.

On this week’s episode of “What’s Eric Eating,” chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel and beverage director Arjav Ezekiel join CultureMap Houston editor Eric Sandler to discuss their Austin restaurant Birdie’s.

Widely considered one of Austin’s top restaurants, Birdie’s has earned local, regional, and national acclaim, including a place of the 2025 Time100 Next list, Food & Wine magazine’s 2023 Restaurant of the Year, and a 2025 James Beard Award for Outstanding Professional in Beverage Service to Ezekiel. In a 2024 column, James Beard Award winner Chris Shepherd recommended that Houstonians visit Birdie’s the next time they’re in Austin.

Sandler’s conversation with the duo begins with a little bit about how they met while working together in New York and their decision to move to Austin. From there, it turns to Birdie’s counter service model that’s unusual for a restaurant of its quality. Sandler asks whether not offering traditional table service has lowered the restaurant’s profits.

“It’s the opposite. Because we have a leaner labor force in the dining room, our margins are probably double what they would be if we were a traditional restaurant,” Ezekiel explains. “What we’re able to do is take a portion of that margin and invest it back into our team. We talk about ‘Conscious Capitalism’ a lot. That extra margin pays for paid family leave that we offer to everybody on our team, the month of paid and planned vacation every year, the subsidized health insurance, the subsidized mental therapy we offer. We needed to find more change under the cushions, so we could invest it back into our team.”

Initially, Birdie’s opened with an a la carte menu. In 2025, it switched to a prix fixe format that offers diners six courses for $80. The switch means the restaurant serves fewer diners per night, which has shortened the wait to order from up to an hour to 20 minutes or less. Chef Malechek-Ezekiel explains that this change has also expanded the range of dishes she’s able to serve and broadened the techniques she uses to create them.

“We can cook fish confit. We can use the Japanese robata grill to cook on charcoal. We can hot smoke fish to order. Now, I feel like, wow, look what we can do now. Before, we had the skills, but we couldn’t physically do it with how tiny our space is.”

Listen to the full episode to hear more about how Birdie’s guides diners through its wine list, which of the monthly prix fixe menus has been the most successful, and the couple’s thoughts on potentially opening a new restaurant.

In this week’s other episode, Craft Pita chef-owner Raffi Nasr joins Sandler to discuss some recent news in the world of Houston restaurants. Their topics include Tex-Mex restaurant Superica transforming into a casual steakhouse; the imminent opening of delivery-focused Shredders Pizza; and a change in operations at Weights + Measures.

In the restaurant of the week segment, Nasr and Sandler describe their recent meal at Oru, a new sushi restaurant in the Heights from the team behind Michelin-recognized omakase counter Neo and Upper Kirby hand roll concept Kira. Listen to hear their favorite dishes as well as Sandler’s quibbles with a couple of aspects of the experience.

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Photo by Mackenzie Smith Kelly

Birdie's owners Arjav Ezekiel and chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel are this week's guests.

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