Atlanta Food and Wine 2012 Festival time

• Courtesy Atlanta Food and Wine Festival

The food world is abuzz as A-town gets ready to host the second annual Atlanta Food and Wine Festival (AFWF). If you’re unfamiliar, the AFWF is a super-unique event that showcases not only the most celebrated chefs in the Southeast, but the issues that matter most to them as well. The festival is made up of dinner events and cocktail parties, educational seminars, and tastings. This time around, they decided to nix the Food Truck presence to focus on the tasting tents.

Their website explains it way better:

The Atlanta Food & Wine Festival, a weekend like no other that brings together leaders of their craft - barbecue pit masters, award-winning chefs and mixologists, Master Sommeliers, fry cooks and local growers - in the spirit of celebrating the deep food and beverage traditions of the South.

In other words, this festival is pretty legit. AFWF’s Advisory Council of celebrated chefs and industry pros directly contributed to seminar topics and content.

• Courtesy Atlanta Food and Wine Festival

Exciting, right? Festivities begin this Thurs., May 8, with the first round of AFWF dinners held at restaurants all over town. Although a few are already sold-out, you can see which ones are still available here. Be warned, tickets to these babies will set you back a good $150, so you’re gonna have to do some soul-searching to decide if a dinner prepared by a team of the South’s best chefs is worth emptying your pockets for.

The actual festival starts on Friday at the Loews Atlanta Hotel in Midtown located at 1065 Peachtree St. Here’s this year’s ticket breakdown:

First, you have individual tasting tent tickets for a particular afternoon ($100). Tasting tents will be open Fri., May 11, 3 - 6 p.m.; Sat., May 12, 12:30 - 3:30 p.m.; and Sun., May 13, 1:30 - 4:30 p.m. The AFWF tasting tents should be pretty neat, and many would argue, well worth the money. Each tent will feature tasting trails that allow guests to sample several variations of the same dish, one after another, for optimal side-by-side comparing.

More after the jump