Feast Portland 2013 Tickets On Sale Today

Tickets for this year's Feast Portland festival are now on sale! It may be hard to choose which events to attend, but it's also impossible to go wrong

By Sam Dean

May 20, 2013

Image may contain Human Person Advertisement Poster Collage Drink and Beverage

Feast Portland 2013 Tickets On Sale Today

When we call Feast Portland a weekend-long food festival, we're not talking about a big field with a bunch of food vendors--it's a four-day, citywide celebration with cooking classes, tasting panels, talks, brunches, and butcher contests, all built around collaborations between local, national, and even international chefs.

Last year, that meant that Feast-goers got to eat food made by chefs such as Sean Brock, Andy Ricker, Inaki Aizpitarte, Gabrielle Hamilton, Paul Kahan, Chris Kostow, and Chris Cosentino (among many others); they learned how to brew coffee from the Stumptown brain trust; and they dug into a whole cured pig from Olympic Provisions. And that's just the stuff we had time to write about (and that was the first Feast Portland ever).

This year it's going to be even better. Tickets are on
sale today for the more than 40 events that make up the
2013 Feast Portland (September 19-22), and all of them sound pretty great. You can see the full schedule here, but here are some of the bigger events we're looking forward to:

Like last year, the kick-off for the whole weekend is a massive
Sandwich Invitational, where 15 chefs compete to come up with the best sandwich--like Naomi Pomeroy's maple-glazed pork belly with pickled watermelon slaw sliders, which took home the prize in 2012.

Friday's big event is the
Night Market, where Andy Ricker, Eddie Huang, Paul Qui, and Anita Lo dominated in 2012, serving up Asian-inflected food in an outdoor street market atmosphere. This year, Danny Bowien, Hugh Acheson, Christina Tosi, and a bunch of other chefs are adding to the killer lineup.

After months of qualifying rounds, the best butchers and fishmongers in the country are coming together on Saturday for the (free)
Best Butcher Contest and Fishmonger Face-Off. It's like one of those lumberjack competitions on TV, except with sharper knives, softer targets, and an end result you can actually eat.

There are going to be a ton of
hands-on classes and tasting panels over the course of the weekend, too, like a "pairing smackdown" between beer and wine, a rundown of the fermented foods of Japan, basic pig butchery with the founder and owner of the Portland Meat Collective, and a class taught by Andy Ricker on how to make some of the authentic Thai dishes from Pok Pok at home.

And, of course, there's the
dinner series, with collaborations between chefs like Stephanie Izard and Cathy Whims, Michael Solomonov and Scott Snyder, and Aaron Franklin (of Austin's legendary Franklin BBQ) and Portland pitmaster Rodney Muirhead. It would be physically impossible to actually go to all of them (especially since some of them happen at the same time), but we certainly wish we could.

There's plenty more, too, and it's all on the Feast Portland website. You can head over and get your tickets now--and the sooner the better, since some of these events tend to sell out way, way in advance.