How Andrew Zimmern Navigates Food Festivals While Sober
The 2025 South Beach Wine and Food Festival is here! One of TV's biggest names in food shares how he makes it through party-heavy, booze-filled weekends like this one.
Unlimited free food, entertainment, and drinks — that’s what you get when you get yourself into any of the New York or South Beach Wine and Food Festivals. Then there’s the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, other specialty festivals, and everything else in between.
Often times, tickets for events can run paying attendees hundreds of dollars. If you’re a host (or are covering them with a press pass like I usually am), they’re free. Either way, the open bar mentality applies: “I paid $200 for this I’m drinking everything I can” or “It’s free, so I might as well take advantage.”
But what happens if you’re sober?
Ahead of the 2024 SOBEWFF, I spoke with Andrew Zimmern, celebrity chef and vocal sober person. In honor of this year’s festival, I’m sharing our conversation about how he — someone who often hosts and appears at these festival parties and events — gets through it.
This conversation has been condensed for clarity:
RA: I know that you have been very vocal about your sobriety. As somebody who is sober myself, sometimes these events can get really overwhelming because you're buying a ticket and there's free alcohol and all of that. Do you have any words of encouragement for sober folks who are navigating festivals or big events like this?
AZ: How long have you been sober?
RA: A little more than a year and a half.
AZ: Congratulations. That's awesome. I love hearing that.
RA: Thank you.
AZ: I am public about my sobriety. I am very public about the fact that I am also a very large proponent of 12-step meetings. I've been sober for a couple of days in a row myself, and I am blessed to be able to mentor a lot of folks in the 12-step programs that I belong to. I tell everyone, “Have a plan. Have a plan, for everything you do.”
I've been sober 32 years; I still make a plan. I already have a plan with friends to go to a meeting that I regularly attend [in Miami] on Saturday morning and Sunday morning. That helps me start my day right. I have a plan to spend time with sober friends when I'm down there. That helps me keep my mindset in the right state.
Editor’s note: This conversation happened in January 2024. Zimmern is now 33 years sober, and I have been alcohol free for nearly three years.
If people who are sober sober — where it's official, where it's not a sober curious thing, but we actually identify ourselves as sober people — I think what's really important beyond having a plan, or I guess the importance of having the plan, is that if I don't, then all of a sudden it's kind of like I'm on secret time; and we're only as sick as our secrets.
And so if I am already plotting like, “Oh, I'm going to go to a meeting this day and I'm going to these events with these sober friends,” I'm doing this and I'm doing that — and, by the way, they can also be with friends who just know you're sober — then all the other things that might challenge my mindset, upset me, or all the way to a triggering event are non-issues; they just don't happen.
When people ask me, you know, “It's been a long time and you've been sober for a while,” I remind them that I tried for 10 years before my current sobriety and it didn't work. I couldn't stay sober for more than five minutes. But when you become official official, there's five or six things that I do all the time, and when I do those things, I can be reading a book in a liquor store all day and not want to have a drink: Go to meetings, have a plan, talk to other people, don't keep any secrets — it's pretty easy.
RA: That's great. Thank you. I appreciate that.
AZ: And by the way — as communication and media is a form of service work — I don't recommend people in their first year of sobriety to go into a tent where there's 200 vendors with free booze. I could not have handled that in the first five years of my sobriety. Go to other things. There's lots of other stuff. After a while, all of that other shit goes away, and you can go anywhere and be anywhere. In my first year, I just didn't even want to risk it; my sobriety was the most important thing in my life, so treat it like that.
Where do you live?
RA: I live in New York, in the city.
AZ: Oh, fantastic! What a great place. I tried to get sober there for a bazillion years.
I'm a born and bred New Yorker. The problem wasn't New York, the problem was me. Ultimately I had to be sent away with a one-way plane ticket to Minnesota, but Sunday it'll be 32 years.
RA: Oh, wow! Congratulations.
AZ: Thank you.
RA: That's really huge. Yeah, New York is a trip and a half.
AZ: It's weird though, because I remember everything about my last week of drinking. I mean, I remember a lot of it, and on one hand, it seems like yesterday, I'm like, how the fuck did I get to be … I mean, people refer to me as an old timer, and I'm like, how the fuck did that happen?
Do you go to meetings?
RA: I don't, actually. I have not been.
AZ: There's a point in my life where I was like, “Well, the only way I know how to get sober is how I got sober.” But the fact of the matter is, I have a lot of friends who've gotten sober different ways, and so what used to be black and white to me now has a lot of gray area.
RA: It’s interesting you say that, too, because I think before I was able to do it, I thought it was so black and white. And then once I realized it wasn’t, then I was able to do it.
AZ: I mean, the most important part of the whole thing is that you're happy and not using. That's the most important thing.
Very exciting, a year and a half.
RA: Yeah, it is exciting.
AZ: God, was I a mess at a year and a half.
RA: I’m feeling good …
AZ: I bet you are! I felt great!
RA: I feel great and it's very nice. I'm enjoying it. And then I get to talk to people like you and be like, “Yep, I can still be in this business and not do that.”
AZ: Of course you can. Of course you can.