Taste of AfriKin Returns for Miami Spice 2026

The AfriKin Foundation announced that its signature food festival, Taste of AfriKin, will return to Maison AfriKin in North Miami on Labor Day weekend — Sunday, September 6, from 6 to 9 p.m. — as part of Miami Spice 2026, in partnership with the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau and the City of North Miami.

What sets the event apart from Miami’s crowded festival calendar is its structure: rather than a generic “Caribbean food” theme, the evening is built around chef stations representing 15 distinct national food and beverage traditions — spanning the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Sint Maarten, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago alongside West African nations including Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. The pairing is deliberate: it treats Caribbean and West African cuisine as points on a shared culinary lineage rather than separate categories, tracing a line from the transatlantic exchange of ingredients and techniques that shaped both regions’ food cultures.

The night builds to its signature program, the Jollof Cook-Off, in which chefs from across the African continent and its diaspora prepare their own versions of jollof rice — the West African rice dish claimed, contested and reinterpreted across a dozen countries — for live judging by the audience. The evening also includes a full performance lineup, an art exhibition and a DJ set, rounding it out as much as a cultural showcase as a tasting event.

For travelers, the festival is a useful entry point into a broader culinary story: Miami has increasingly become a proving ground for Caribbean and diaspora chefs before their food and reputations travel back to the islands themselves. Events like this one function as a preview of flavors and trends showing up on resort menus across the region in the following year.

More Food & Wine Articles