World Gourmet Festival Bangkok wraps 26th edition

The 26th World Gourmet Festival Bangkok closed on 4 October 2026, after six days of chef-hosted dinners at the Anantara Siam Bangkok Hotel under the theme "The World of Flavours."

The format stayed close to the one that has defined the festival for over two decades: visiting chefs took over the hotel's restaurants for one-night-only menus, cooked alongside the property's own kitchen teams rather than in isolation. Dinners ran across venues including Spice Market, Biscotti, Guilty Bangkok and Madison Steak Avenue.

World Gourmet Festival's international roster

Six days, a dozen kitchens, and chefs who rarely cook under the same roof.

The World Gourmet Festival's confirmed line-up drew from restaurants rarely found on the same bill. Julien Royer, whose three-Michelin-starred Odette sits in Singapore, cooked alongside Josiah Citrin of Mélisse in California and Dave Pynt of Burnt Ends, also in Singapore. Bangkok supplied several of its own stars: Tamaki Kobayashi of the two-Michelin-starred Le Normandie by Anne-Sophie Pic, Arnaud Dunand of Maison Dunand, Giacomo Primante of Etcha, and Dylan Jones and Bo Songvisava of Bo.Lan.

Further afield, the roster reached Vuong Thanh Vo of CoCo Dining in Ho Chi Minh City, Paul Gamauf of EDVARD at Anantara Palais Hansen in Vienna, Heros De Agostinis of Anantara Palazzo Naiadi in Rome, and Zee Yunze Zheng of Fabula in Shanghai.

Minor Hotels, which owns and operates Anantara, has hosted the World Gourmet Festival every year since its first edition. The Anantara Siam property, the group's Bangkok flagship, has built the event into one of the longer-running chef festivals in Asia, old enough that some of this year's guest chefs were still training when it began, in a city whose hotel kitchens keep changing hands.

This year's edition also introduced a Young Chef's Award, a new competition judged by the visiting chefs that gave emerging Thai cooks a formal route onto the same programme as three-Michelin-starred names. It is a small addition to a festival built mostly around established reputations.

A week built around collaboration

The closing event, a Champagne Brunch at Parichart Court on 4 October, brought the week to an end in the format the festival favours: multiple kitchens working one room rather than one chef taking a solo bow.

Minor Hotels has not said when the 27th World Gourmet Festival will run, though the event's history points to late September again. Few hotel-hosted food festivals in the region can claim a run this long; most are reinvented, renamed or quietly dropped well before their third decade.