An Innovative Food Festival Is Coming To Houston This August

Food festivals are a blast. Trying a variety of yummy bites, chatting with the chefs who made them, hanging out with friends in an easygoing atmosphere—what’s not to like? 

It turns out that behind the scenes, food festivals aren’t nearly as fun for chefs and in many cases they end up losing money by participating. A first-of-its-kind food festival called COMMUNE, from Indie Chefs Community (ICC), is looking to change that. The Houston, Texas, food festival is set to run from August 21 to September 5, 2021. Ticket presales for ICC mailing list subscribers launch on July 1, with general ticket sales beginning on July 6.

COMMUNE is an experiential dining compound that will be home to degustation pop-ups, collaborative dinners, classes, roundtable discussions and a street market experience. The self proclaimed “anti-food festival” was designed with chefs in mind. To that end, COMMUNE will cover all participation costs for chefs, including travel, lodging and the food they prepare. Additionally, the festival will offer a revenue share model for restaurateurs hosting marquee events that will require them to close their brick and mortar establishments to staff and participate in activations. 

Giving back to the community, championing social justice and addressing systemic issues facing the hospitality industry are other key missions. To accomplish this, COMMUNE will donate 50 percent of net proceeds of all sales from the first week of the festival to Chefs Stopping AAPI Hate. Festival organizers have placed an emphasis on spotlighting a diverse range of talent. Of the more than 200 participating chefs, 45% self-identify as female and 40% self-identify as BIPOC. Additionally, given the ongoing global pandemic, COMMUNE will ensure that all participating talent, sponsors, staff and volunteers are fully vaccinated.

Confirmed events in the lineup include NoLa La Land (in which the chefs from Konbi and Turkey & the Wolf will mash up their popular sandwich menus), Chefs Stopping AAPI Hate All Star Collab (a prix fixe menu created by Kevin Tien, Tim Ma and more than 20 AAPI chefs and allies), and an EmbraceRace Dinner hosted by Danny Lee (part of Lee’s collaborative dinner series highlighting the importance of educating and raising children to be thoughtful and informed about race).

I had the opportunity to connect with Grover Smith, the founder of Indie Chefs Community, and talk about all things COMMUNE. I’ll let him take it away from here.

Abigail Abesamis Demarest: How did this idea for an “anti-food festival” come about? 

Grover Smith: Previously, I was the GM of a few restaurants and attended a handful of festivals with our chef who needed help getting the work done and setting up on site.

We were always excited about getting out of the restaurant to go hang out with our peers, but it was tempered by the reality of what we’d signed up for—hundreds or thousands of portions of canapés with little to no budget, asking the staff to prep extra food when they were already stretched thin, and the daunting task of packaging and traveling with all of your ingredients while maintaining food safety en route. Then there was the whole issue of asking us to basically pay our own way, and that never sat right with me.

I’ve been doing smaller scale gatherings of 24+ chefs for years, and we figured out a way to make it work. The chefs are serving food on actual plates, and it’s representative of the type of food they’re serving in their own restaurants. We always pay their way and make sure everything we sign them up for is at no additional cost to them. I wanted to show it was possible to execute that type of event at a larger scale. 

I also wanted to do it in a way that didn’t impact participants’ restaurant operations and bottom line, so we worked out some revenue sharing opportunities when participation would severely impact a restaurant’s revenue for the week.

Demarest: How long has COMMUNE been in the works? Why did you choose to host it in Houston?

Smith: The idea had been kicking around in my head for over four years in some form or another. The COVID shutdown gave me a few months of downtime while being a stay-at-home dad, so I started figuring out ways to make it happen in my spare time. I started posting Close Friends Instagram posts a few months back to gauge interest and it was overwhelming, so we started vetting the health-related issues like vaccination and infection rates for COVID and what the local area looked like as far as being able to accommodate this event. Once we settled on vaccinated participants and doing everything outdoors, we were ready to go for it.

I’d been in discussions with Gin Braverman of Gin Design Group about collaborating on something in the future, and I told her what I was thinking on a whim—mostly to get someone to talk me out of doing it. But she took my ideas and basically made them a designable reality, so here we are.

I chose Houston because it’s my home. I have two small children and my wife Jackie has a demanding job so if I was going to commit to something so large-scale I needed to be close by. I also wanted to bring something different to Houston for the community to experience. Half the fun for the chefs at our events are the off time activities and itineraries. All the visiting chefs will have plenty of downtime, and they’ll get to experience the side of Houston I’m so proud of—the culture, food and sense of community. It’ll be big for the city and I think a lot of the chefs will be very pleasantly surprised.

Demarest: What is your ultimate goal with COMMUNE? Is the intent for this to be an annual event?

Smith: I’m working on developing some ideas that are similar, but I think COMMUNE may be a one-time only type thing. We have a confluence of factors that made doing something like this so appealing. There’s widespread vaccine availability, and our peers in hospitality have adopted it at a very high rate. Indie Chefs has been building a community of friends on top of an already close community of national chefs that haven’t gotten to see each other in person for over a year. Add in the nightmare of the COVID shutdown and basically being forced to pivot month after month just to survive, and I think that makes this type of gathering only possible now. It’s going to be incredibly cathartic. I think everyone is incredibly excited to work together on something like this.

Demarest: Can you tell me a little bit about the Indie Chefs Community, for those that may not know?

Smith: Our main goal is to build closer chef communities. Chefs tend to operate in silos and are incredibly competitive and aren’t the best at sharing their experiences and what they’re personally dealing with. We try to break down those barriers and build a network of friends that checks in on one another, shares best practices and resources, and can act as a support system for one another. We want to find creative ways to communally solve our issues on a macro level whether they be food systems, labor issues, healthcare, mental health or just plain operations. I was so proud to see so many of our members work together during COVID to get past each hurdle, disseminate information and start incredible programs like Off Their Plate, Everybody Eats Philly, the Power of 10 Initiative, Chefs Stopping AAPI Hate, Project Restore Us, and too many others to even name. Indie Chefs Community has now done over 40 events in 14 markets and over 700 chefs have participated in the past seven years.