Tickets for the 2026 Hawaii Food & Wine Festival go on sale this morning, May 23, at 9 a.m. Hawaiʻi time. If you have ever thought about timing a trip around one extraordinary meal, this is the event to circle. It is the festival’s sixteenth year — founded by chefs Roy Yamaguchi and Alan Wong in 2011, per the festival’s official history — and one of Hawaiʻi’s biggest culinary events. It is also one of the few reasons I would tell a fall traveler to book a specific weekend before booking anything else. The chefs come from around the world. The ingredients come from a few miles down the road. That contrast is the whole point. Here is how the 2026 festival is laid out, how tickets actually work, and how to build a trip around it without overpaying for a hotel you barely sleep in.

The festival spreads across three weekends and three islands, running from October 16 to November 8, 2026. Each island gets its own weekend, so you pick the one that fits your trip rather than chasing all three. Island of Hawaiʻi (Big Island) opens the festival on the weekend of October 16–17. Kāʻanapali, Maui takes the middle weekend, October 23–25. Oʻahu closes it out the weekend of November 5–8. Those are the published weekends as of late May. Individual event days and start times get finalized closer to the festival, so confirm the exact dates on the official schedule before you book flights. If you are already weighing fall against other seasons, our best time to visit Hawaii guide covers what late October and early November feel like on the ground.

The festival is not one ticket. It is a series of separate ticketed events across the three weekends, and you buy into the specific dinners, tastings, and seminars you want. A grand tasting is a different ticket than a multi-course chef dinner, which is a different ticket than a hands-on seminar. That structure rewards planning. The marquee dinners and the headline tastings sell out first, and they rarely come back. When tickets open at 9 a.m. on May 23, the popular events can move fast. If a particular chef or format is the reason you are going, treat the on-sale morning like a concert presale and have your picks ready. Buy directly through the festival site. Prices vary widely by event, from walk-around tastings up to the high-end dinners, so check the official site for current pricing rather than trusting a number you read somewhere else.

Per the festival’s about page, the full run brings together over 150 world-renowned chefs, culinary personalities, and wine and spirit producers. The 2026 lineup is typically announced around the time tickets go on sale — check the festival site for the current chef roster before locking in your events. The events themselves come in a few shapes. Grand walk-around tastings let you graze dozens of stations in one room, drink in hand, with chefs cooking a few feet away. Seated chef dinners are the splurge: multiple courses, paired pours, and a kitchen full of names you would otherwise have to fly to three different cities to eat. Seminars and demos sit in between, where you actually learn something instead of just eating well. It is a fundraiser underneath the glamour. The festival is a program of the Hawaiʻi Ag & Culinary Alliance, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and has raised more than $5 million for culinary education and local beneficiaries over its run. Your dinner ticket pushes money back into Hawaiʻi agriculture and the next generation of island cooks.

The festival started small. Chef Roy Yamaguchi spent years hosting a benefit dinner for the Hawaiʻi Farm Bureau at his original Roy’s in Hawaiʻi Kai on Oʻahu, inviting chef friends to cook and raise money for local growers. He and fellow chef Alan Wong saw a bigger idea in it, and they launched the Hawaii Food & Wine Festival in 2011 (per the festival’s about page). Both men are central to the Hawaiʻi Regional Cuisine movement, the early-1990s push by a dozen island chefs to stop importing what Hawaiʻi could grow and catch itself. Both are also James Beard Award winners — Yamaguchi for Best Chef: Pacific Northwest in 1993, Wong for Best Chef: Pacific in 1996. The festival is essentially that founding idea at full volume: world-class technique, island ingredients, money flowing back to the farms.

You will not be at festival events every hour of every day, and you should not try to be. The best meals of a Hawaiʻi trip are often the cheap ones between the big ones — a plate lunch from a truck, a poke bowl eaten on a seawall, fruit from a roadside stand. Build the rest of your eating around the island you chose. Our island dining guides are the place to start: Big Island dining, Maui dining, and Oʻahu dining. If you want to go deeper on where the food comes from, a farm tour pairs well with a festival weekend, and a guided food tour on Viator is an easy way to taste a neighborhood without a plan. Watching the budget? Our tricks to save money on food in Hawaiʻi keeps the in-between meals from quietly draining the trip.

If you are even a little food-driven, yes. Late October and early November sit in Hawaiʻi’s shoulder season, after the summer crush and before the winter holidays. Crowds thin out, room rates ease off their peak, and the weather is still warm and dry on the leeward coasts. It is one of the better value windows of the year, and the festival gives it a center of gravity. Pick your island first, then book the festival events, then book lodging near the host area so you are not driving home tipsy from a wine dinner. The Maui weekend sits in Kāʻanapali on the west side, so plan to stay and play out there — our Maui dining guide and the broader Maui travel guide cover lodging zones and what is open on that stretch of coast. You will want a car on every island to reach the venues and the food trucks in between, and booking early through Discount Hawaii Car Rental keeps the rate down. For more of what is happening around your dates, check our running Hawaiʻi events coverage.