Hawaii Food & Wine Festival 2013

I had an amazing opportunity to experience my FIRST Food & Wine Festival!
The event that I attended was Under the Modern Moon, which was held on Thursday, September 5 at the Modern Hotel (which is my FAVORITE hotel in Waikiki!).

When we arrived at the hotel, we went up the stairs and then in the ballroom to check-​in. Our general admission tickets ($ 200 value) was then scanned from a cellphone by the QR code. Once that was done we continued on and received a Food & Wine festival wine cup and wooden fork.
I honestly had no idea what to expect at this. My honest first thoughts was «Uhhhh, what are we suppose to do?» HA-​HA.
Basically at this event, you go around to the different food and drink booths and just try everything. Once I realized that’s how it works, I was so scared to see how crazy long those lines were going to get. Surprisingly there were hardly any lines. If there was a line, it was super fast or short.
The Grub:
{{ PORK BELLY }}


Can you say — MIND BLOWN. This dish was created by chef Eric Ziebold, and I have to say — this was by far the best dish of the evening. It was salty, savory, delicious goodness. I mean I never would have thought that pork belly, with fish eggs would actually work so well together.
{{ ARUGULA CRUSTED KONA LOBSTER ROULADE }}
This was super tasty!
I could not believe all the amazing chefs that came down for this event, it was just simply amazing! I was also surprised to see that chefs flew down here just to attend the event as well.
I saw Hurbert Keller, Adam Richman and Ming Tsai! :D
I didn’t want to bother any of them for photos because I know that they are just trying to enjoy the event like the rest of us and probably gets really tired of people always stopping them for photos.
Speaking of photos… it’s so damn hard to hold a drink, a plate of food and try to take a photo of it –_​_​_​_​–
Now — TO THE DRINKS: D
Because there was just so much going on at once, I didn’t get to try all the different Mixologist drinks, unfortunately… However, I did have the opportunity to try Julie Reiner and Francesco Lafranconi.
{{ BLUSH BABY }}:
Out of her two cocktails, this one was my favorite :)
I didn’t get a chance to take a photo of Francesco’s Japanese Alibi because the sun went down and it was dark and I kind of got tired of trying to juggle everything in my hands when I took pictures.
{{ JAPANESE ALIBI }} This cocktail was, interesting… It honestly tasted like my milk after I eat a bowl of coco puffs and reese’s peanut butter cups. No Joke. In the cocktail was TyKu Coconut Nigori, Kai Coconut Pandan Vodka and Peanut Butter Mix.
For the wines, I think I hit all of the ones that came to the event. The two winery’s that stood out most to me was Justin Vineyard & Winery and Weingut Gunderloch.
{{ JUSTIN VINEYARDS & WINERY }}
I really really enjoyed the Sauvignon Blanc and the Isosceles. Very nice wines.
{{ WEINGUT GUNDERLOCH }} I really enjoyed the dry Reisling. Very very nice :)
So my overall first experience at the Food & Wine Festival was great! I definitely want to come back next year or even attend a different event. This was a great opportunity to taste dishes from chefs all over the world and to taste exquisite wines.