Why Local Chefs Are Bailing on the Music City Food + Wine Fest

Since it launched in 2013, the Music City Food + Wine Festival has regularly mixed chefs from around the nation with some of Nashville’s best local restaurant talent to create one of the most sought-after tickets in town for culinary fans. But if you scan the lineup for this year’s MCFW Fest — which takes place downtown Sept. 20-22 — you’ll notice that many of Nashville’s favorite chefs are missing.

Maneet Chauhan and her restaurants (Chauhan Ale & Masala, Mockingbird, Tánsuŏ, Chaatable) are out, as are Andy Little (Josephine), Hal Holden-Bache (Lockeland Table), Tony and Caroline Galzin (Nicky’s Coal Fired), Sarah Gavigan (Bar Otaku, Otaku Ramen), Josh Habiger (Bastion), Julia Sullivan (Henrietta Red), Trey Cioccia (Black Rabbit, Farmhouse), Larry Carlile (Earnest Bar & Hideaway), Khalil Arnold (Arnold’s), Chris Carter and James Peisker (Porter Road Butcher), Karl and Sarah Worley (Biscuit Love, ’za), and Kyle Patterson (Sinema). Also sitting this year out are all of the M Street restaurants (Virago, Kayne Prime, Moto). Additionally, Pat Martin (Martin’s Bar-B-Que, Hugh Baby’s) has scaled back his participation dramatically.

There are myriad reasons behind the departures. For example, Habiger and Sullivan and their staffs mostly skipped last year’s festival, as Strategic Hospitality — the ownership behind their restaurants as well as The Catbird Seat, Pinewood and more — curated the food for the VIP section of the Pilgrimage Music & Cultural Festival in Franklin that same weekend. Strategic Hospitality won’t participate in either event this year due to other commitments. Others tell the Scene that it simply wasn’t worth the effort for little return to their restaurant. But many chefs have expressed frustration with aspects of the MCFW management, the direction of the festival, an increased amount of alcohol, and problems with participation in other C3 Presents events. C3 is a major event-promotion company that was largely behind the NFL Draft events in Nashville in April.

For the past few years, the Pat Martin & Friends event has been a highlight of the festival, a fan favorite featuring pitmaster Martin in charge of massive a live-fire cooking display at one end of Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park. Martin would routinely invite both local and out-of-town guests to cook all manner of beef, pork, game and poultry, and then divvy up the goods for hungry festivalgoers. Last year featured experienced hands like Tyler Brown (Southall) and Edgar Pendley (Urban Grub), as well as newcomers like Gavigan and Vivek Surti (Tailor), cooking alongside Brooklyn’s Billy Durney (Hometown BBQ) and Asheville, N.C.’s Elliott Moss (Buxton Hall). Martin says he has put tens of thousands of dollars of his own money into the event but didn’t get the kind of response from festival organizers that he did from attendees, who gathered enthusiastically to watch the cooking process.

“I just didn’t ever feel that C3 ever really appreciated what I was trying to do with our live-fire activation,” Martin says. “Then you couple in the fact that there were no real dollars given to support a local charity, knowing it was important to us as restaurateurs and chefs, and my decision became easier.” Martin says his burger chain, Hugh Baby’s, will participate in the event’s Sunday morning Gospel Brunch.

Music City Food + Wine spokesperson Sarah Abell says the festival is committed to being a partner with charities.

“The festival has a track record in supporting local charities, including making an annual donation to Music City Inc., the Nashville Convention and Visitors Center’s 501c3,” Abell says. “Kings of Leon have hosted a charity golf invitational tournament as the unofficial kickoff to MCFW weekend for the past five years. The Kings established a pediatric cancer research fund at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital in the name of their former creative director, Brett Kilroe, who battled stage 4 colorectal cancer before losing his battle and passing in 2016. The tournament has raised $100,000 since its inception.”

Abell also noted that the festival is adding a charitable component to the Titans/Predators cook-off on Friday night.

Multiple chefs tell the Scene that they have been participants for many years out of a sense of obligation to Nashville’s food scene and because they saw MCFW as a good marker for the city on a national stage. But those positive feelings have been eroded as the festival has brought back many of the same national personalities year after year — Aarón Sanchez, Tim Love and Jonathan Waxman — while providing less of a spotlight for local talent. 

“It’s almost like we’re the B-team in our own city,” says Holden-Bache, who adds that he wishes Nashville chefs were featured more as part of demonstrations and mini-events at the festival. He says he and business partner Cara Graham might attend the fest, but he decided it was time to end Lockeland Table’s participation. Both Holden-Bache and Martin cite the The Nashville Food Project, a local charity focused on sustainability and hunger issues, as something they wish MCFW supported.

Abell responds that Waxman’s presence as a founding partner “affords us the opportunity to showcase some of the world’s biggest culinary figures.” 

“Our media partnership with Food & Wine magazine has helped promote the festival on a national scale,” Abell says. “As a result, a large number of attendees are from out of town and make Nashville a destination over MCFW weekend. National chefs were an early draw in establishing the festival’s profile, and as Nashville’s culinary scene has become more prominent over the years, we have made a concerted effort to highlight more local chefs, restaurants and artisanal purveyors to build on that authenticity. We have purposefully kept the festival smaller in scale for a better and more intimate experience for our guests, resulting in limited profitability. The panel discussions and promotions always have a mix of local and national chefs and speakers.”

The final straw for several local chefs, though, was this year’s NFL Draft. C3 contracted with local chefs to provide food for the Fan Experience area outside Nissan Stadium. The idea was to feature local food for out-of-town football fans — restaurants paid for stalls and were required to buy Pepsi products for resale to customers in addition to their dishes. 

Communications provided to the Scene show that C3 told restaurants to expect to sell 600 items per day, based on projections from past drafts in Philadelphia and Chicago. But many restaurants sold as little as a third of those projections. Coupled with equipment costs and mandatory staffing incurred just for the event, many restaurants took a loss on the event or barely broke even. A lack of coordination by C3 meant that some restaurants duplicated each other’s dishes — two did meatball subs, two did turkey legs, three did hot dogs — effectively canceling each other out. And the site provided poor foot traffic for some restaurants.

“When we pulled up, all of the booths were behind a row of trees,” says Nicky’s Coal Fired co-owner Caroline Galzin. “All of the signage was hidden behind trees in full bloom, and nobody could see us.”

While participants had been encouraged to use local ingredients and biodegradable utensils, Tony Galzin says upon arriving they found pallets of pre-made Sysco products being used by other food providers. A C3 rep told them that going green and local with products was “merely a suggestion.” Galzin and other chefs fumed. 

“The best way to get a bunch of local chefs to cancel out of your event is to invite them to another event and then bend them over,” Galzin says, noting that he understands why people eat burgers and hot dogs at a stadium event. He says C3 didn’t realize the difficult situation it was creating. “They stacked up a bunch of stadium-food vendors slinging Sysco shit, and those guys crushed it. And they sold a bunch of local restaurants on selling local food and putting a unique spin on things, and we got hosed.”

The following week, when a C3 rep called to book Nicky’s into MCFW, Galzin says they turned it down. Chauhan, Carlile and Cioccia all had booths at the NFL Draft, but none will be at MCFW. Galzin says he still has eight cases of Pepsi products he can’t give away sitting in the back of his restaurant.

“C3 Presents was hired by the NFL as a producer of the draft to execute logistics,” Abell responds. “The C3 team does give feedback, but it’s ultimately the NFL’s event, and they make all of the final decisions. A few chefs did share that they were disappointed with the NFL Draft Fan Experience, and we spoke with every team to get specific details. MCFW is a completely different festival, and to compare the two is not appropriate. MCFW is a partnership between C3 Presents and Nashville locals, Ken Levitan (Vector Management) and Kings of Leon.”

For the Worleys, whose Biscuit Love concept has grown from a food truck into multiple restaurants, the decision to sit out this year’s festival wasn’t difficult.

“I think there’s this sense that it’s your home festival and you needed to do it,” says Sarah Worley. “Karl and I have decided to focus our time and attention on festivals that have some kind of scholarship opportunity or are doing something for the greater good — not just a moneymaker for the festival. Because those are the ones that we would like to attend. I think that the festival in Nashville has not evolved much after the first year, so it’s stale for us.”

Sarah Worley also notes what several other chefs cited as a problem — the number of alcohol vendors at the tasting tents on Friday and Saturday.

“It’s hard to showcase what you do when there’s people just getting shitty [drunk] everywhere,” she says.

Abell says MCFW is listening to its participants.

“We take feedback from our post-event survey very seriously, and our goal since the festival started seven years ago is to continually evolve the experience,” she says. “We adapt programming based on festivalgoers’ feedback.”