The Group Of Celebrity Chefs Who 'Crashed' Guy Fieri's Tribute Dinner
This past weekend marked the 21st South Beach Wine & Food Festival, an annual event hosted by Food Network and Cooking Channel in Miami Beach, Florida that celebrates all things food, wine, and spirits. Per the SOBEWFF website, the four-day festival kicked off on Friday, February 24, and featured over 70 events hosted by more than 400 prominent figures from the culinary world. Foodies in attendance were able to sit in on seminars and masterclasses in addition to dining on meals cooked by some of the industry's biggest stars.
Arguably the biggest event of the SOBEWFF is its tribute dinner which, this year, was held in honor of the Mayor of Flavortown Guy Fieri for both his illustrious on-screen career as well as the charity work he's done behind the scenes, particularly for restaurant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic (via Bloomberg). Per The Miami New Times, the event was hosted by José Andrés and included a multi-course meal created by several celeb chefs like Alex Guarnaschelli and Michael Voltaggio, as well as a live auction held by "The Kitchen" star Jeff Mauro. Sounds like a fun time, right? Well, apparently some of our favorite chefs thought so too, as a number of them ended up "crashing" the meal. They don't seem to feel bad about it, either, as one of the crashers even took to Instagram over the weekend to own up to their intrusion.
These dinner crashers were helpers, not hinderers
If you've ever seen "Wedding Crashers," you may be thinking that the chefs that intruded on Guy Fieri's SOBEWFF tribute dinner this past weekend caused some sort of chaos at the event. However, it appears that was hardly the case. According to an Instagram post from chef Richard Blais, he and the rest of the "uninvited" guests actually went to work upon showing up to the soiree. "Crashed the @guyfieri tribute dinner. Helped plate food for friends who are legends," the "Top Chef" champ captioned a photo of him, Antonia Lofaso, Tiffani Faison, and Marcus Samuelsson posing with Michael Voltaggio (via Instagram).
Fans and friends loved hearing that the Food Network stars lent their pal a hand, as evidenced by the 8,700-plus likes and rain of heart and hand-clapping emojis that Blais' Insta pic has amassed as of this writing. The comments section was also flooded with compliments for the group of celeb chefs, who were dubbed "the dream team" by a number of Instagrammers. "I can only imagine how much of a blast that was!" quipped one fan. As of this writing, Fieri has not commented on the snap, so it isn't clear how he felt about his big night getting infiltrated. However, the "Triple D" host himself is guilty of crashing at least one SOBEWFF event in the past, leading us to believe that he might have been unbothered by the intrusion.