By Dathan Kazsuk
I know you’ll love this event as much as I do.
And to give you a little extra incentive to find out for yourself, we’ve got a discount: use code TAT2026 for 10% off your tickets to the 2026 NCRLA Chef Showdown Grand Finale.
In the past, I’ve attended and covered the NCRLA Chef Showdown multiple times since its early years, and it remains one of my favorite food-and-beverage events on the calendar. Why? Because instead of reading about some of the best chefs, bartenders, and North Carolina beverage producers in the state, you get to walk around for a couple of hours and actually taste what they can do.
And trust me: show up hungry.
The 2026 Chef Showdown marks the competition’s 10th season and culminates Wednesday, Sept. 2, at Bay 7 at Durham’s American Tobacco Campus. After months of preliminary and semifinal competitions around North Carolina, the field has been whittled down to 15 savory chefs, five pastry chefs and six mixology teams, each partnered with a North Carolina distillery. The Grand Finale is the only round of the competition open to the public.
What makes the night so much fun is the format. You wander. You eat. You sip. Then you wander some more.
Guests can sample bite-sized versions of the dishes that earned each chef a spot in the finale, desserts from the pastry finalists, and cocktails and spirit-free creations from the mixology teams. And you aren’t just there to eat and drink—you get a vote, too, helping determine the People’s Choice winners for savory dish, dessert, cocktail, and spirit-free cocktail.
One of my favorite parts of Chef Showdown has always been discovering someone I didn’t know before walking through the door. Sure, there are chefs from restaurants you may already recognize, but there are also people doing some really creative things in kitchens and behind bars across North Carolina. The same goes for the distilleries. You might walk in knowing your favorite bourbon or gin and leave with another North Carolina producer on your radar.
For me, that’s what Chef Showdown does so well. It puts a big chunk of North Carolina’s food-and-drink scene into one room for one night.
So yes, I’ll be there again this year, probably eating more samples than I should and arguing over which one deserves my People’s Choice vote.
I think you should be there, too.
