We will share more information about our 2021 program soon,
to be held at the Culinary Institute of America at Copia November 3-5, 2021!
22nd Annual | Virtual Edition | November 10-13, 2020
The world is suddenly both smaller and larger—as the warmth of the global kitchen draws us closer.
We are united around issues and concerns that affect the restaurant and foodservice industry worldwide, even as we take different paths to reopen and sustain our businesses. Chefs and cooks gather through screens and social media platforms. We are discovering new horizons virtually, even as we mostly put our travel plans on hold. We have never been more connected through food with family and friends and with our customers from near and far.
This 2020 edition of Worlds of Flavor, taking place November 10-13 on your nearest screen, is our first-ever virtual one. The community and festive characteristics of the Worlds of Flavor conference will be as central as they are when we gather in person at the CIA in the Napa Valley, as we see an even greater opportunity this year to connect and open virtual doors to kitchens, dining rooms, fields, streams, rice paddies, city streets, food trucks, and night markets. We’ll celebrate chefs the world over by visiting them in their home countries (and sometimes literally in their homes), rather than having them visiting us in ours.
With World Kitchens, World Tables: A Celebration of Chefs and Community, we’re bringing the travel, the road—the taco stand, the street food vendor, the world class cooking suite, the wood fire, the barbecue pit, the culinary garden, the dumpling maker, the spice market, the flavor innovator—to you. You’ll get to watch demos and presentations, ask questions, network, interact, meet cookbook authors, participate in cook-alongs, tour world markets, and pop up on screen if you want.
Community has never felt like a more important word. We’ve had to take care of ours in more direct ways than before. Every one of our actions can impact our communities in both good and bad ways more than ever. Restaurants, chefs, cooks, servers, farmers, fishermen, artisans, have struggled equally, exposing the fragile system upon which the foodservice industry has long relied. We’re rebuilding, rethinking, recasting to be stronger than ever before, and closer than ever before. Family, family meal, family at work, family at home—we loved and cherished them before, we love, value and hold them even closer now that we risked losing them.
Amidst the uncertainty of the last few months, what has been certain, what we can always rely on is the creativity, passion, dedication, hard work, and ingenuity of chefs. Cooking has always been a challenging industry—more than ever, chefs have poured their heart and minds into finding new ways to take care of others. From turning dining rooms into grocery stores and reinventing dishes to fit new delivery formats to opening community kitchens to feed healthcare workers and those in need around them and turning sidewalks into safe and welcoming dining spaces, creative has taken on meanings much beyond what goes onto the menu. And flavor has never left center stage. Through it all, creating the most delicious food possible, and making it accessible to an audience broader than before—in no small part because of changing economic and tourism business realities—has been top of mind for chefs the world over, digging deep in traditional repertoires to both find and provide comfort and experimenting with the ingredients of a forcibly changed supply chain.
World Kitchens, World Tables will celebrate all of this: the creativity, the resilience, the power, the collaboration, the ingenuity, the relentlessness, the tenacity, the passion, the deliciousness, the tradition, the innovation. We’ll come together as a community to watch culinary demonstrations and food tours from chefs and experts in Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Thailand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Australia, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, France, Spain, Italy, Canada, Jamaica, St. Croix, and across the United States. We’ll follow along as they take us to the places where they shop, from farms to markets. We’ll talk flavor strategies, and business strategies that will make us stronger and more resilient. We’ll eat tacos for breakfast and noodles at midnight. We’ll discover the future trends shaped by these last few months of invention and reinvention. We’ll explore, we’ll debate, we’ll share, and we’ll even cook together.
So join us for what is both the 22nd edition and the very first virtual edition of the Worlds of Flavor International Conference & Festival, November 10-13, 2020, from the comfort of your home, office, or kitchen. As we gather in November, we’ll dive into the flavors, ingredients, and techniques that will inspire the future of American menus. We’ll bring the world to you with chefs coming to us from dozens of countries to share what they are most excited about: the foods of their homelands. We’ll check in to see how they are doing. We’ll talk about the sparks that have been alighted anew as the restaurant industry has been turned upside down, and what drives chefs to continue feeding their communities day in, day out. We’ll feast, we’ll celebrate, we’ll learn, we’ll share, we’ll connect. Online, closely, at one very big table.