How Yes Chef Food Fest Is Rewriting the Rules of Eating Out in New York
Two years ago, Yes Chef Food Fest was a two-day pop-up behind a Williamsburg bar. This year, it’s taking over the parking lots at Citi Field.
That jump, from a single backyard bar to a Major League Baseball stadium’s footprint, tells you something about where food festivals are headed in New York, and why more diners are choosing them over a traditional restaurant reservation.
From a Backyard Bar to a Stadium Lot
The festival launched in August 2024, when Jack Goldburg, the social media creator behind Jack’s Dining Room, curated what Time Out described as “New York’s most viral food sensations” for a two-day event at BK Backyard Bar in Williamsburg. Goldburg, who has built a following of more than 2 million people documenting restaurants across the city, wasn’t running a traditional hospitality business. He was translating an online audience into a physical gathering, built around the same appetite that made his videos popular in the first place.
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The formula worked well enough that the festival outgrew its first home almost immediately. By 2025, it had relocated to a 40,000-square-foot former drive-in space in Greenpoint, according to Time Out’s coverage of that year’s event, with Goldburg telling the outlet the goal was to let people take part in “culinary moments they might never had access to,” pointing to touches like a 300-pound bluefin tuna cutting ceremony as an example of the kind of spectacle the festival was built around.
For 2026, the festival’s own site confirms the event has moved again, this time to the parking lots at Citi Field in Queens, running on September 30. The festival’s promotional banner lists the hours as 3 to 10 p.m., while its FAQ section states 3 to 7 p.m., so attendees may want to double-check the final hours directly with the festival before planning their evening. The site describes the lineup as more than 35 restaurants and culinary concepts, alongside named appearances from chefs including Massimo Bottura, Michael Mina, and Thomas Straker, along with a COTE-branded experience from chef David Shim.
A Different Deal Between Diners and Restaurants
Part of what separates a festival like this from a typical food fair is how the money moves. According to the festival’s own FAQ, a general admission ticket covers entry, a set of complimentary samples, and access to demonstrations and entertainment, but any food purchased beyond those samples is paid directly to the individual restaurant vendor, with the site stating that 100% of those food sales go straight to the vendor rather than being split with the festival itself.
That structure changes the economics for both sides. For diners, it means a single ticket buys access to dozens of restaurants they’d otherwise have to visit one at a time, spread across a season or a year, each with its own reservation, travel time, and price point. For restaurants, it offers a way to reach a large, already-engaged crowd in a single afternoon, without needing to run their own marketing to fill the room.
Why the Format Keeps Growing
The bigger shift is in who’s doing the curating. Yes, Chef Food Fest didn’t start inside the restaurant industry. It started with a food-content creator who selected restaurants he already covered online and invited his audience to taste them in person. That’s a different model than a traditional food festival built around a culinary institution or a city’s tourism board. It may explain why the event has scaled so quickly, moving from a bar patio to a stadium parking lot in two years while, according to its own site, selling out in each prior New York run.
For New Yorkers, the practical effect is a new middle ground between eating at one restaurant and reading about a hundred of them online. A festival ticket compresses a long list of reservations into a single afternoon, built around the same restaurants and chefs already circulating through people’s social media feeds. Whether that model holds up as it keeps growing into larger venues is still an open question, but for now, the trajectory points in one direction: bigger locations, more restaurants per event, and a growing appetite among diners for tasting a city’s food scene in one sitting instead of one reservation at a time.
