The festival that MGM Resorts built to replace Vegas Uncork’d is happening this week, September 24 through 27, 2026, across four properties and more than 30 venues on the Las Vegas Strip. Drink Las Vegas features a lineup including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Michael Mina, Roy Choi, Wolfgang Puck, Masaharu Morimoto, Tom Colicchio and Mary Sue Milliken, alongside a second wave including Tiffany Derry, Maneet Chauhan, Eric Adjepong, Karen Akunowicz and Paul Carmichael.
Tom Holland is also attending. His Bero non-alcoholic beer brand is running its own featured event. Everyone from Tom Colicchio to Roy Choi to Jon Taffer to Sylvester Stallone will be there, making Spider-Man the most unexpected celebrity of the culinary festival circuit in 2026.
That last detail would be easy to dismiss as marketing gimmick if the rest of the lineup were not genuinely serious. It is, and this matters. The combination of world-class culinary talent, a celebrity who represents the non-alcoholic beverage movement, and the physical infrastructure of four MGM Strip properties creates something that Las Vegas has not had since Vegas Uncork’d ended in 2019: a culinary festival with enough institutional backing and talent density to function as a genuine destination event for food and drink travelers rather than just an amenity for guests already in town.
What Replaced Vegas Uncork’d and Why It Matters
There once was a festival called Vegas Uncork’d, last held in 2019, that took over a weekend on the Strip to showcase the brilliant restaurants, bars, chefs and mixologists this city offers. Drink Las Vegas is designed to address some of the issues that eventually limited Uncork’d while preserving what worked.
Vegas Uncork’d ran from 2007 through 2019, building a reputation as the premier Las Vegas culinary event before going on hiatus and never returning in its original form. The gap between 2019 and 2026, seven years, left Las Vegas without a flagship culinary festival despite the massive growth in the city’s restaurant scene, its Michelin Guide inclusion in 2023, and the continued expansion of celebrity chef presence across Strip properties.
Ryan Abboushi, President of Entertainment for MGM Resorts, framed the event’s purpose explicitly: DRINK Las Vegas is about celebrating the innovators and leaders who are pushing the beverage world forward, bringing together incredible talent to spark conversations, share ideas and highlight the creativity happening in this space, while shining a spotlight on cocktail culture in Las Vegas.
The beverage-forward framing is the strategic innovation relative to Uncork’d, which was primarily positioned around food. Drink Las Vegas explicitly centers cocktails, wine, and non-alcoholic beverages as equal to cuisine rather than subordinate to it. This positioning reflects where the broader hospitality industry has moved: beverage programs are now considered primary culinary expressions rather than support systems for food menus.
The Four-Property Architecture
The inaugural Drink Las Vegas runs from September 24 through 27 at four MGM Resorts properties: ARIA, Bellagio, The Cosmopolitan, and Park MGM, incorporating more than 30 venues across the four properties with an opening party, panels and seminars, food and cocktail tastings, lunches, dinners and other experiences.
This four-property structure creates a geographic concentration of festival activity across the central Strip corridor that attendees can navigate on foot or with minimal transit. ARIA and The Cosmopolitan are adjacent. Bellagio is across Las Vegas Boulevard. Park MGM is two blocks south. The compact geography enables guests to attend multiple events across multiple properties within a single day without the logistical complexity of outdoor festival transportation.
The shared infrastructure also allows MGM to leverage its culinary assets across all four properties simultaneously. Chefs including Tom Colicchio at Craftsteak, Michael Mina at multiple venues, Wolfgang Puck at Spago, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten at Jean Georges Steakhouse represent restaurants that are already operational within MGM’s portfolio, meaning the festival activates existing kitchen infrastructure rather than requiring temporary installations.
This asset leverage is the key economic distinction between Drink Las Vegas and outdoor food and wine festivals that build temporary infrastructure from scratch. The kitchens are already there. The restaurants are already open. The festival organizes access and curates programming around infrastructure that costs MGM nothing incremental to have in place. The marginal cost of the festival is primarily talent fees, marketing, and event coordination rather than physical infrastructure.
The Pricing Tiers and Who They Serve
Event pricing spans multiple tiers: large tasting parties starting at $125, opening night events at $250, intimate chef dinners and specialized experiences at $275 and above. A 100-point wine tasting guided by an Eleven Madison Park sommelier and a James Beard Foundation partnership event represent the premium programming tier.
This tiered structure serves multiple customer segments simultaneously without requiring any single event to compromise its positioning for the others. A guest with a $125 budget can attend Roy Choi’s late-night cocktail party at Park MGM’s On the Record. A guest with a $500 budget can attend an intimate chef dinner. A Master of Wine or serious collector can attend the 100-point wine tasting at Bellagio. The festival creates price access points across the full spectrum of culinary tourism spending capacity.
For MGM Resorts, each event tier generates different economic outcomes. The large tasting parties drive high-volume, lower-per-head spending with broad audience access. The intimate chef dinners generate premium per-head revenue with limited availability that creates scarcity value. The specialized wine and spirits programming serves a collector demographic whose spending across hotel and casino during festival weekend is disproportionately high relative to event ticket price.
The Bero and Non-Alcoholic Positioning
Tom Holland’s Bero non-alcoholic beer appearing as a featured element of a Las Vegas beverage festival is more strategically significant than the celebrity hook suggests. It reflects the same sober curious demographic shift we have documented throughout this series, in Sunday Circuit at LIV Beach, in Breath and Beats yoga events, in the wellness economy growth story.
A Las Vegas culinary festival in 2019 would not have featured non-alcoholic beverage programming as a primary element. The conventional assumption was that Las Vegas entertainment centers on alcohol and that premium drink programming meant wine, spirits, and cocktails. Drink Las Vegas including Bero signals that MGM is programming for the full spectrum of its current customer base rather than the customer base that existed when Vegas Uncork’d ran.
The Bero integration also provides marketing value that a purely alcohol-focused festival cannot access. Tom Holland’s appearance generates social media coverage from his fanbase, which extends well beyond culinary travel audiences. A younger demographic that follows Holland becomes aware of Drink Las Vegas through his participation in a way that chef lineup announcements alone would not produce.
Key Insights
Four-property asset leverage across ARIA, Bellagio, The Cosmopolitan, and Park MGM activates existing kitchen and restaurant infrastructure rather than requiring temporary installations, creating a marginal cost structure that outdoor festivals building from scratch cannot achieve. Tiered pricing across more than 50 events serves the full culinary tourism spending spectrum simultaneously without requiring any single event to compromise positioning. Non-alcoholic beverage inclusion reflects the sober curious demographic shift that has reshaped Las Vegas entertainment broadly, generating marketing access to younger demographics through celebrity participants like Tom Holland.
Seven-year gap since Vegas Uncork’d creates first-mover positioning for Drink Las Vegas as Las Vegas’s flagship culinary festival at a moment when the city’s restaurant credentials, including Michelin Guide coverage and multiple starred establishments, are substantially stronger than they were in 2019. Beverage-forward framing positions cocktails, wine, and specialty drinks as primary culinary expressions rather than food accompaniments, reflecting where the hospitality industry’s creative energy and premium pricing power have shifted.
Notes on What This Week Reveals
Drink Las Vegas is happening alongside Golden Knights preseason hockey at T-Mobile Arena, Ali Wong at Encore Theater, Marc Anthony at BleauLive, the Aces beginning WNBA playoffs, and the full September entertainment calendar that has been the subject of this series’s final chapters. The culinary festival does not compete with any of these. It occupies a distinct niche: guests who are in Las Vegas specifically for food and drink, or who extend a Las Vegas trip to include the festival alongside another primary entertainment motivation.
The food traveler demographic that Drink Las Vegas targets is one of the highest-spending and least-cannibalizing categories Las Vegas can attract. They fill hotel rooms, spend across multiple restaurants during their stay, and generate revenue at the luxury end of every hospitality category. Their presence during a September weekend that might otherwise see softened tourism adds incremental economic activity without displacing any existing demand.
Whether Drink Las Vegas becomes an annual institution or a one-time experiment will be revealed by attendance data and per-head spend across the four properties during the festival weekend. If the numbers support the investment, expect MGM to announce 2027 dates before the calendar year ends. And expect every other major Strip operator to evaluate whether they can build something comparable before MGM’s first-mover advantage solidifies into category ownership.
