Inside the Harare Food & Wine Festival's biggest year yet

It started as an afternoon. A handful of restaurants, a few cases of wine, and a lawn that could hold a couple of hundred people if nobody minded standing close. Six years on, the Harare Food & Wine Festival runs across a full weekend, hosts dozens of vendors, and draws a crowd that now plans the rest of its May around it.

Growth that fast breaks things. The organisers are candid about the year the queues nearly sank the event — a single entry point, paper tickets, and a Saturday that started with a forty-minute line in the sun. "We almost lost the room before anyone had tasted anything," one of the founders said.

The fix was logistical, not culinary. Timed entry windows spread the arrivals. Multiple gates with their own scanners cleared the queue. And moving ticketing onto phones meant the door team could see, in real time, how many people were actually inside.

The food got room to be the story again. This year's programme leaned harder into local producers — small-batch cheeses, regional wines, a whole section given over to street vendors who'd never had a festival stall before.

The lesson the team keeps repeating is one any growing event eventually meets: the experience people remember happens after they're inside, but whether they get there happy is decided at the gate.