Top Chefs Descend On Houston For Record $1.7 Million Food Festival With Heart — Southern Smoke Sets a New Standard

The powers that be at the Houston-based nonprofit Southern Smoke have 1.7 million reasons to celebrate. Southern Smoke founder Chris Shepherd and his wife Lindsey Brown, the co-founder and executive director, saw their fifth annual fundraiser The Southern Smoke Festival at Discovery Green raise that $1.7 million, the most money ever raised during a Southern Smoke event.

More than 3,000 attendees mingled among some of the best and brightest in the restaurant world. Since 2017, this charitable foundation has granted more than $15 million to workers in the food and beverage industry.

“We are so proud and inspired by the outpouring of support at this year’s Southern Smoke Festival,” Lindsey Brown says. “Raising $1.7 million is more than another milestone for our team. It’s a lifeline for food and beverage workers nationwide who turn to SSF in times of need.

“Every ticket purchased, chef who cooked, beverage pro who poured, and partner who showed up helps ensure that we can continue to care for the people who make our industry thrive day in and day out. This year proves what’s possible when our community comes together, and we left feeling more energized than ever before.”

In real terms, based on the average grant, Brown estimates that the $1.7 million alone can aid 596 food and beverage workers with emergency relief grants and cover the cost of mental health counseling in three states.

This year’s Southern Smoke brought more than 85 notable chefs, mixologists, and sommeliers from Houston and beyond — the most talent ever assembled for the festival since its inception. Highlights included a gathering of the 2025 class of Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs to cook together for the very first time; Houston bookstore Kindred Stories hosting an array of cookbook signings; and the Lexus VIP experience featured two floors of culinary and beverage luminaries at The Grove in downtown Houston. These included Ashley Christensen (Poole’s Diner, Raleigh), Ana Castro (Acamaya, New Orleans), and Alba Huerta (Julep, Houston).

Attendees also enjoyed an immersive activation at The Lake House in Discovery Green, as well as live cooking demos on the YETI Culinary Stage.

Southern Smoke initially launched in 2015 in response Shepherd’s friend and former sommelier getting diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. For the next two years, Southern Smoke raised more than $463,000 for the MS Foundation. In 2017, when Hurricane Harvey ravaged Houston, the focus shifted to providing immediate financial aid to those in the industry most directly affected.

Today, with the aim of serving as a safety net for the industry from coast to coast, the Southern Smoke Foundation provides emergency relief, as well as no-cost mental health services to cooks and chefs, farmers and waitstaff, winemakers, distillers and brewers nationwide. Less than 15 percent of food and beverage workers had health care coverage before the pandemic.

Many restaurant employees are hourly workers living from shift to shift and in a crisis have impossible choices to make about prioritizing housing, groceries and medical care. Southern Smoke steps in to help cover the cost of those essentials. Aid also extends to their families. More than 55 percent of grant recipients have at least one minor child at home, one-third have two and many of the recipients are single parents without any child or marital support.

Southern Smoke is there to assist their needs too.

Southern Smoke’s New Mission

In a nation where access to critical mental health care can be scarce, Southern Smoke’s innovative program Behind You, a first-of-its-kind resource, is there to help restaurant workers in 13 states across America. The foundation begins by distributing grants to universities that offer graduate-level programs in psychology, social work, clinical mental health and/or counseling, enabling participants in Behind You to receive up to six months of counseling guidance from licensed clinical supervisors. Today, more than 9,000 sessions have been granted to food and beverage workers and their kids, and discussions with universities across the nation continue in the hopes of expanding the program to every state.

“So far, the largest share of our resources has been directed to emergency relief,” Brown says. “It consistently exceeds counseling needs. Budgeting for the year ahead, we know exactly how much our Behind You program is going to cost because we have contracts with all those universities. However, we have no idea what is going to happen in the emergency relief world. This year, we have seen so many more serious medical cases come through. Those individual emergency cases are bigger and need more of our support.”

In the years to come, Brown hopes to add a third pillar to Southern Smoke’s mission statement.

“Right now, we very much within our two pillars: emergency relief and mental health,” she says. “Once we get to a point where we have secured mental health care in 25 states and feel strongly we’ll be able to maintain that with our funding, it’s been a goal  –especially of Chris — to add a third pillar, which would be to provide free legal help for those in the industry.”

If you didn’t make it to the Southern Smoke Festival this year, well, there’s always next year. Plans are already in the works for the foundation’s second largest endeavor Southern Smoke Decanted, which will take place the last week of March in a new home: Lott Hall in Hermann Park.

This daytime wine and food event, coupled with a wine auction, features all of Houston’s own Michelin-starred chefs serving food at a vintner’s reception before paddles are raised later in the day.