The 12 Best U.S. Food Festivals in 2024
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In many cases, exploring a city’s local food scene can be the top reason someone chooses to visit in the first place. But besides being able to sample a destination’s best restaurants, food festivals can also be an excellent opportunity to get in as much of a culinary experience as possible in a relatively short amount of time. Fortunately, there are plenty of options for those looking to eat up when they hit the road. Read on for the best food festivals in the U.S. that are worth traveling to, according to experts.
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The Taste of Chicago has been a summertime highlight in its namesake city since it launched in 1980. Since then, the festival has grown to be one of the biggest in the country and inspired spinoff iterations in other cities, including Taste of Chicago Austin. To get an idea of just how iconic it is, over a million people attended in 2019 —which is a crowd that outnumbers Chicago’s Lollapalooza.
The annual event is free to the public and typically spans three to five days, featuring over two dozen food vendors. Attendees can also enjoy free concerts from both new and beloved artists.
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Whether you love it or are mystified by it, Spam remains one of the most beloved shelf-stable food products on the market, thanks to its versatility as an ingredient. Those looking to celebrate the beloved canned meat can get their fill at the Waikiki Spam Jam festival , which bills itself as one of Hawaii’s top annual food festivals with more than 30 vendors.
“Visitors can sample creative Spam dishes from local restaurants (think classic Spam musubi or Spam burnt end skewers), shop local vendors, and enjoy a block party,” says Alex Howard , travel writer and editor with Lonely Planet .
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While many food festivals happen during the summertime, Eat Drink SF is a notable autumn celebration. Since 2009, the festival has given Bay Area restaurants an opportunity to show off their skills, with more than 150 eateries feeding thousands of attendees at the annual 10-day event.
Per Visit California , the event includes chef collaborations, price-fixed menus for lunch and dinner from a variety of restaurateurs, cooking demonstrations, and lectures and talks throughout.
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Some food festivals require careful planning and a free spot on your schedule to be able to attend. But one popular fixture in the Big Apple provides a unique experience throughout an entire season .
“If you want to try food from all of the countries represented in Queens, New York, head to the Queens Night Market in Flushing Meadow Corona Park,” says Becca Siegel , co-owner and travel writer at Half Half Travel blog. “Rather than taking place just one day or one weekend, this ‘night market’ takes place on Saturdays from 4 p.m. to midnight every summer.”
It’s also an incredibly diverse set of eating options. “There’s food from vendors selling Brazilian, Filipino, Tibetan, Fujianese, Mexican, Antiguan, Indonesian, Ashkenazi Jewish, Salvadoran, and Bangladeshi treats,” she says. “What’s not to like?”
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Maine is synonymous with fresh, delicious lobster, so it might not come as a surprise that the state is home to a five-day event celebrating the crustacean. For just shy of a week, the Maine Lobster Festival puts your cracking skills to the test as tens of thousands of visitors descend onto Rockland to enjoy buttery, lobstery goodness.
Of course, the festival includes eating lobster, but you can also look forward to cooking contests, entertainment, and local artisan booths. It also serves as a fundraiser, having donated half a million dollars to communities across Midcoast Maine since 1947.
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The Picklesburgh Festival was once voted the Best Specialty Food Festival in America. While the simple pickle might seem like an odd thing to celebrate, the festival is a locally beloved celebration and expanding to four days for its 2024 showing.
The food found here includes international dishes, prepared specialties, and even cocktails that include pickles as an ingredient. Those feeling particularly brave can even enter the annual pickle juice drinking contest.
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Are you the type of person to quadruple up on the amount of garlic called for in a recipe? If so, there’s an annual celebration you might want to mark off on your calendar .
“Known as the ‘Garlic Capital of the World,’ Gilroy hosts this pungent festival celebrating all things garlic, with dishes ranging from garlic ice cream to flaming garlic shrimp,” says Arsen Misakyan , travel expert and founder of LAXcar.
This year, the festival will introduce a “Garlic Chef of the Year” contest and expand its range of garlic-infused vegan and vegetarian options. It also features live music, and those who are able to score tickets can enjoy a seated garlic-themed dinner among the famous Gilroy cherry orchards.
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If you’re hoping to get a real taste of one of Wisconsin’s most beloved foods, the Cheese Curd Festival is a great way to dive in. This free festival started in 2001 and incorporates cheese curds in all their best (and squeakiest) forms. Locals would probably argue that deep-fried curds are the big favorite here—they’re considered a true Wisconsin delicacy worthy of a trip.
And the event is not just about all things dairy: Guests can also sample more than 30 different types of craft beer along with their curds, as well as hard ciders and local wines. There’s also free live music and a cheese curd eating contest for the truly dedicated.
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Created in 1983, Lexington’s Barbecue Festival has become one of the country’s most notable celebrations focused on food fired on the grill and in the pit . Each October, thousands of visitors and thousands of pounds of barbecue come together in a delicious party atmosphere. Notably, the festival serves one kind of BBQ: Lexington Style .
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Whether you’re looking to experience a new type of “meroir” or can’t seem to stop shucking, the annual Wellfleet OysterFest has become a regional hit for a reason.
“Running since 2001, this two-day fest held in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is a tribute to the beloved bivalve,” says Howard. “In addition to live music, beer and wine, and local seafood, visitors can witness the oyster ‘shuck-off’ competition , in which competitors race against the clock to shuck as many oysters as they can and ultimately take home the Golden Oyster trophy.”
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Many food-obsessed travelers would tell you that there’s no bad time of year to be eating in New Orleans . But among the many festivals that celebrate the city’s unique culinary traditions, there’s one that stands out to locals as a true gem.
“The Creole Tomato Festival is my personal favorite. It is smack dab in the middle of the French Quarter and at the beginning of our hot weather season, so it has a much more relaxed atmosphere than the spring and October festivals,” says Christopher Falvey , co-founder of Unique NOLA Tours . “If you’re looking to do a great NOLA festival with fewer people, this is the one.”
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Dallas’ Carne Asada Fest is more than just another food festival. It’s also a celebration of the Latinx culture that can be found all over the city as well as in the rest of Texas and across the United States.
This festival is relatively new to the food fest scene; They held their first annual event in 2021. Even so, over two dozen vendors were on hand to serve up the savory as well as the sweet to visitors of the fest on its first run.
This story has been updated to include additional entries, fact-checking, and copy-editing.
30 Travel Movies to Help Inspire Your Next Trip
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One of the great things about movies is that they can take you places without you having to squeeze into an uncomfortable airplane seat or with all the other hassles that real-life travel entails. There are lots of great movies about people setting out to see the world , so let the big screen scratch your wanderlust by checking out these 31 films.
Some of the movies on this list are romantic, following two people as they come together in that special way that happens when you’re away from home. Others are about journeys of self-discovery, showing what can happen when you hit the road solo. Some movies are uproarious comedies that will transport you away from your troubles as you laugh along to the antics on screen. There are also movies that are less of a vacation than they are an adventure, sure to get your blood pumping. And there are some scary movies about travel—the sort that might make you think, “You know, actually, maybe let’s make this one a staycation.”
Don’t bother packing your bags. All you need to do is hit “play” to embark on any one of these 30 great travel movies.
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Romantic Travel Movies
Diane Lane stars in this charming 1996 movie as a recently divorced woman who travels to Italy in an attempt to break out of her post-divorce funk. (In her defense, her husband was cheating on her and he got to keep the house, so she’s right to be miffed.) Once in Tuscany, though, she somehow becomes the owner of a villa, and as she begins to make a new life for herself, the potential for new love emerges amidst some of the most beautiful scenery and delicious-looking wine ever put to film. It’s the type of movie that will have you looking up flights to Florence.
A destination wedding counts as travel, and the breakout comedy of 2023 was shot on location in Australia. Glenn Powell and Sydney Sweeney play two people who left on bad terms after a one-night stand only to have to make nice when their mutual friends get married. Anyone But You is enough to make you want to take a trip Down Under, although perhaps without all the rom-com shenanigans.
Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz play lovelorn women who swap homes so that they can get away from their respective heartbreaks over Christmastime. When Winslet’s Iris and Diaz’s Amanda get to Los Angeles and London, respectively, they find new love in Jack Black and Jude Law’s characters. The 2006 movie, from the great Nancy Meyers , works extra well as a travel movie because, thanks to the house-swapping premise, it’s a reminder that everyone’s home is somebody else’s trip.
The first of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy introduces audiences to Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Céline as they meet on a train from Budapest and decide to spend the night together wandering Vienna. Widely regarded as one of the more romantic movies ever made, Before Sunrise will also make you want to explore Vienna with someone you’ve just met—someone who maybe you could see yourself spending the rest of your life with.
Technically, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a travel movie (because Owen Wilson’s character is visiting Paris with his fiancee, played by Rachel McAdams ) and a time travel movie (because he goes back in time to 1920s). It’s a romantic movie both because of the relationship Wilson’s Gil strikes up with Marion Cotillard’s Adriana and because of how it romanticizes Paris and nostalgia—and deftly interrogates that romanticism.
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Movies About Traveling Solo
Dev Patel stars in this 2016 film, which is based on the true story of Saroo Brierley , who was separated from his parents in India at a very young age and adopted by an Australian couple. Once he grew up, he went back to his birth country in an attempt to find his biological parents. Saroo’s trek through India and into his own forgotten past is a tear-jerking, emotional travel story, and Lion was rewarded with six Oscar nominations.
This 2014 adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail stars Reese Witherspoon as Strayed sets out to hike from Southern California to Washington State in an attempt to find herself. The tour of the West Coast’s trails is a tour-de-force for the actor as her character remakes her life one hiking boot-clad step at a time.
In 1977, Robyn Davidson set out on a nine-month journey across the unforgiving Australian Outback with her dog and four camels. She later wrote about her adventure in National Geographic and in her memoir Tracks . In 2013, her story was adapted into a film with the same name. Mia Wasikowska plays Davidson in the movie, which features stunning cinematography of the Australian desert in all its harsh beauty.
A lot of solo travel stories are tales of self-discovery where the voyager has learned something by the time they reach their destination. Into the Wild offers no such catharsis, instead telling the true story of Christopher McCandless , a man who hiked across America and eventually ended up in the Alaskan wilderness—an environment he was not prepared for. It’s a poignant, tragic counterpart to the more common celebrations of wanderlust you tend to see in pop culture.
Julia Roberts stars as Elizabeth Gilbert in this 2010 adaptation of her memoir of post-divorce travel and self-discovery. Feeling her life is aimless and without purpose, Liz elects to travel around the world, stopping in Italy, India, and Bali where she eats, prays, and well, you can probably guess.
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Travel Horror Movies
Ari Aster’s supremely disturbing folk horror movie stars Florence Pugh as a young woman who is begrudgingly invited by her not-great boyfriend and his friends to go to Sweden to observe a commune’s midsummer festival. Upon getting there, Pugh’s Dani soon learns that the Hårga are not all sunshine and flowers, and that there are dark rituals and sinister plots. It’s the type of movie that will make you think twice about a Nordic vacation, and you’ll never look at a taxidermied bear the same way.
This 2005 horror movie, from director Eli Roth , is one of the biggest examples of the so-called “torture porn” subgenre, but there’s more to Hostel than just blood and guts. (There are a lot of blood and guts, though.) The film follows some American backpackers who, while traveling in Eastern Europe, become the victims of a shadowy organization that lets the ultra-rich live out their most depraved fantasies by torturing and killing unsuspecting tourists. Let’s just say that Hostel is not exactly a great promotional tourism campaign for Slovakia—something that the country was actually pretty upset about .
This 2022 film, released by the horror-centric streaming service Shudder, follows a social media influencer who, when traveling in Thailand, meets and befriends a young woman. It’s the type of movie that lives or dies on its twists, but let’s just say that Influencer is what you would get if The Talented Mr. Ripley were set in the social media age and a full-on horror film instead of a thriller.
The Creator director Gareth Edward’s 2010 debut follows a photojournalist as he tries to escort a young woman through Mexico, which has been taken over by kaiju-sized alien monsters. There are moments of beauty and discovery along their journey, as well as high-stress moments of terror when they encounter these creatures, which Edwards brings to life on a shoestring budget—though you can’t tell that by watching.
It’s right there in the title: John Landis’ 1980 comedy horror is about an American in London, although he’s not a werewolf when he first arrives in the UK. No, that happens after he’s mauled by a strange beast in the moors of Yorkshire—and that same beast kills the friend he was backpacking with. When he recovers in London, things get gnarly in the light of a full moon.
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Comedy Movies About Traveling
If you like the misadventures of the Griswold family’s first vacation attempt, great news: There are five sequels to this 1983 Chevy Chase comedy. Before the European , Vegas , or Christmas Vacation , though, Clark Griswold tries to drive his family from Chicago to southern California. Their journey makes for some classic comedy, though it might hit a bit too close to home if you’ve had to endure a family vacation that went awry.
A lot of Wes Anderson’s movies are about travel, including his most recent film, Asteroid City , and The Grand Budapest Hotel . His ultimate travel movie, though, is 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited , which stars Owen Wilson , Adrien Brody , and Jason Schwartzman as three estranged brothers who agree to make a trip through India together in the hopes of reconnecting after their father’s death.
Lots of movies are about travel, but are they about a big adventure, the way Tim Burton’s directorial debut is? Paul Reubens stars as his Pee-wee Herman character, who hits the road in an attempt to recover his beloved bicycle, which has gone missing. Following a psychic’s totally legit vision of his bike in the basement of the Alamo, Pee-wee encounters a ghost trucker, biker gangs, and all the madness of a Hollywood backlot.
Netflix’s Oscar-nominated animated movie has a setup that’s not too dissimilar from that of National Lampoon’s Vacation . Aspiring filmmaker Katie Mitchell can’t wait to get away from her family and start film school. Her dad, voiced by Danny McBride , feels his daughter slipping away and opts to have the whole fam drive her across the country rather than take a plane to school. At the same time, an A.I. gone rogue has started a robot uprising. Oops!
In addition to featuring a hall-of-fame cameo from Matt Damon as the singer of “Scotty Doesn’t Know,” Eurotrip is a classic, if not especially intelligent, teen sex romp. It’s not the movie to watch if you want to get a feel for Europe, but it is what you put on when you want to enjoy some good, dumb laughs.
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Adventure Travel Movies
Ben Stiller directed and stars in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty , an imaginative adaptation of a 1939 short story about a mild-mannered man who gets lost in his daydreams. When circumstances force Walter to embark on a trip around the world, he starts living his daydreams for real, going to Greenland and the Himalayas. Featuring a fantastic soundtrack and gorgeous cinematography of some truly beautiful, off-the-beaten-path places, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is the type of movie that might make you stop just thinking about taking a trip and actually buy a ticket.
William Friedkin , best known for directing The Exorcist , also helmed this 1977 thriller about possibly the worst road trip of all time. When four people, all on the run from their various sordid pasts, find themselves trapped in a remote oil village in Colombia, they are desperate to get out by any means necessary. The opportunity presents itself when the bosses need people to drive boxes of dynamite that are extremely unstable and could blow at any minute across miles of rainforest. There is one sequence in Sorcerer that’s some of the most unbelievably tense filmmaking you’ll likely ever see. (Note that it’s a remake of another classic film, Wages of Fear , should you want another movie that’ll keep you on edge.)
Johnny Depp stars as an average man who finds himself smack in the middle of an international criminal incident when on vacation in Europe after a woman, played by Angelina Jolie , tries to trick the authorities into thinking Depp’s the fugitive they’re looking for. Thrills, laughs, and a little romance ensue.
Charlie Hunnam plays real explorer Percy Fawcett in this adaptation of the book by the same name from author David Grann , who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon . The film follows the British explorer in the early 1900s as he tries, time and time again, to prove the existence of a mythical city deep in the jungles of Brazil. Think of it as a somber, reflective take on a real-life Indiana Jones, one whose obsession with traveling to hostile environments in search of knowledge may prove to be his undoing.
This gripping survival drama about the infamous 1996 Mount Everest Disaster, as documented by Jon Krakauer in the book Into Thin Air, is the type of film that will probably make you consider an all-inclusive beach resort for your next vacation rather than mountain-climbing.
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Movies About Roadtrips
This biopic follows the man who would become the Che Guevara when he, as a young man in the early ‘50s, travels across South America with his friend Alberto Granado . The film, which is based on Guevara’s trip diary, is both a road movie and a coming-of-age film about an important historical figure, as we see him become radicalized by the poverty and inequality he sees on this journey.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan star in Ethan Coen’s romp from earlier this year, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call Drive-Away Dolls “ The Big Lebowski , but just the silly parts.” Set in the late ’90s, it follows two lesbian friends who learn that the car they’ve rented has a human head and a briefcase in the trunk—and that some shadowy types really, really want whatever’s in that case back.
Burt Reynolds stars in this 1977 classic, which was the second-highest-grossing movie of its release year after the original Star Wars . He plays a legendary bootlegger who accepts a job to smuggle 400 cases of Coors from Texarkana to Atlanta in under 28 hours. Along the way, he encounters a runaway bride played by Sally Field , and Sheriff Buford T. Justice, who wants to stop the Bandit. Smokey and the Bandit also features an incredible theme song, “ East Bound and Down ,” and while the lyrics describe the plot of the movie almost beat-for-beat, you’ll find that it’s a fitting song to blast on your own car stereo when you’re on the road.
Il Sorpasso , which is sometimes given the English title The Easy Life , is a masterpiece of 1960s Italian cinema. It follows a boisterous middle-aged man who decides to take a timid, bookish college student he meets under his wing for a good time out on the road—whether or not the younger man actually wants to tag along or not. Hilarious and poignant when you might not expect it, Il Sorpasso ’s well worth the watch.
This seminal adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel of the same name stars Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro as they drive to Sin City under the influence of an absurd amount of drugs. In that way, it’s the ultimate travel movie. It’s about a trip, but it’s also about a trip .
