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For 20 years, the award-winning Deering Seafood Festival has brought Miami together on the shores of Deering Estate for a one-of-a-kind celebration of fresh seafood, island culture, live music, art, conservation, and community.
What began as an honest effort to introduce more people to one of the city’s hidden gems has grown into a South Florida tradition – one built by neighbors; shaped by local chefs, artists, and volunteers; and woven into the fabric of the community.
Now, as the festival marks its milestone 20th anniversary on Sunday, April 12, 2026, the moment is about more than celebrating a beloved event. It is a tribute to the people who built it, the memories made along Biscayne Bay, and the shared spirit that transformed a neighborhood “friend raiser” into a weekend an entire community plans their year around.
That story began in 2004.
The conversations that started it all
For years, Palmetto Bay residents didn’t know the treasure in their own backyard. In fact, unless you’re sailing on the quiet pocket of Biscayne Bay that borders Charles Deering’s 1920s winter home, its museum house and 450 acres of nationally protected land are almost completely hidden behind heavy wooden gates and stone walls. In 2004, Barbara Norland, the newly appointed Executive Director of the Deering Estate Foundation, wanted to change that. She started talking to foundation staff, volunteers, and the Board about how they could bring more people to Deering Estate; not just to see the museum house, but to explore the grounds. To them, it was a no-brainer that people would fall in love with Miami’s “biggest backyard on the Bay” almost instantly – but to do that, they had to know about it.
Those friendly conversations unveiled a unique opportunity. The city never hosted large celebrations or events in South Dade, giving Deering Estate the chance to create something extraordinary that would draw people to the area. Given its bayfront location, they decided to plan a seafood festival. Community-driven from the beginning, foundation Board members and volunteers reached out to their networks. Eric Haas, who then owned the original Old Cutler Inn and Kendall Sports Grill with his wife and 100 Ladies of Deering founder, Lori Haas, used his network to tap local restaurants. (Today, Sports Grill is still the only “landlubber” booth at the festival.) Norland used her experience writing sponsorship agreements for Homestead-Miami Speedway to do the same for Deering Estate. Other members got sponsors like Anheuser Busch, Pepsi, SunTrust Bank, Peacock Embroidery, Diamonette Rentals, First National Bank, South Florida Parents Magazine, and the MDC Parks & Recreation Department to come on board, many of which are still sponsors today.
Six months later, in 2005, the first Deering Seafood Festival was born. It was much smaller in scale than what we know today (and it had more barbecue than seafood) but it still left a mark.
“I’m so proud of the legacy we created,” said Norland. “What started as a grassroots community event with Board members walking through local neighborhoods to hand out seafood festival flyers is now part of the overall fabric of Miami.”
The early years
After that first festival, the Deering Estate Foundation secured a $25,000 Tourist Development Council (TDC) Grant from Miami-Dade County to grow and promote the second installation of the event. Norland and Peter England, another Board member at the time, asked Golden Rule Seafood to be their title sponsor – and luckily, they agreed. Taking their pledge seriously, owners Pam Mullins-Flores and Walter Flores decided that if their name was going to be on the festival, they were going to make sure it was done right.
“The first festival had mostly barbecue, so we said that if we were going to be the title sponsor, there had to be seafood there,” said Flores. “All the seafood vendors had to submit a menu and we kind of controlled what they sold, meaning if we were selling crabcakes, another restaurant couldn’t sell crabcakes. Most festivals let everybody sell whatever, and they’ll have two booths right next to each other selling the exact same thing. That works for some, but at our festival, we had different seafood at every seafood booth.”
They also came up with the idea of doing cooking demonstrations, but the Chef Demo Tent was much more primitive then; it was just a 10×10 tent over the chef and a bunch of chairs set up in the courtyard.
“Walter hired four caterers to come and do a cooking demo,” Mullins-Flores said. “We had five spots, so Walter got up at the end and showed everyone how to clean and filet a fish.”
In 2007, Mary Pettit came on board as Executive Director just three months before the third festival. Determined to use the event to bring more people to Deering Estate (she called it a “friend raiser” and not a “fundraiser”), she and publicist Sheila Stieglitz had big ideas to take Deering Seafood Festival to the next level. While past Executive Directors of Deering Estate felt like they needed to limit visitors to protect a historic property, Bill Irvine, who worked there during Pettit’s tenure, welcomed the idea of getting more people through the gates. To this day, Pettit credits him for giving her and Sheila the freedom to make the festival a huge attraction.
“We put in the Artist’s Village. We segmented the festival into different sections, like Seafood Alley, and created the Deering Discovery Cove to highlight our educational programs and incorporate the idea of ‘conservation.’ For the seafood, we kept it high-end. You couldn’t just have a food trailer; you had to have a restaurant where people could go and eat after the festival, so it promoted local restaurants. We wanted the food to represent the lush, luxurious setting of the estate, so it wasn’t your typical food that you might find at a fair,” said Pettit.
As for the Caribbean vibe, it exploded under their watch.
“We wanted to make people feel like they landed on a Caribbean island in their own backyard,” said Pettit. “We had steel drummers and stilt walkers at the gate, brought in a Junkanoo band with 15-20 members who would weave throughout the festival multiple times a day, and had a live reggae band onstage. We created the little critters you see in the festival’s marketing today, like the shrimp in a chef’s hat that became the logo.”
They hit it hard in those three months, and the 2,500 to 3,000 people they expected quickly became more than 5,000 people.
“The Village of Palmetto Bay only incorporated in 2002 and this was its first major event,” said Pettit. “It’s not a stretch to say we helped put the Village of Palmetto Bay on the map back then.”
Every year, it evolved even more. For example, they didn’t know they needed a protocol for counting attendees, and since members could come and go as they pleased, it was hard to track capacity. They put volunteers at the front gate with counter clickers, and later included admission to Deering Seafood Festival in their membership package as a major selling point. Because of Deering’s art component (the houses hold part of the Deering family’s rare art collection), they made a rule that creators in the Artist’s Village had to be original artists selling island-themed or nautical art – they could not be resellers peddling plastics. Overflow parking and traffic patterns were added, and when that no longer sufficed, University of Miami iBuses, and then charter buses, were brought in as parking shuttles. Eventually, an Uber/Lyft pickup and drop-off spot was added. Logistics and security strengthened with every festival, and technology did, too. Cash-only restaurants started accepting credit cards and even went contactless after COVID.
In 2022, Deering added Chef’s Table on the Bay, a three-course, sit-down dinner and cooking demonstration. Kicking off festival weekend, this sold-out event has featured award-winning Miami chefs like Cindy Hutson, Eileen Andrade, Pablo Zitzman, and more.
“We were committed to continuous improvement,” said Dan Yglesias, who served as President of the Foundation, a Board member, and Deering Seafood Festival chair. “After each event, we held detailed debrief meetings to evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and what we could do better. Those conversations became the foundation for planning the following year, ensuring that we were always evolving while staying true to our mission.”
Finding the festival’s island rhythm – one lesson (and laugh) at a time
Occasional hiccups at big events are unavoidable, but the Deering team always took them in stride.
At their first festival as title sponsor, Pam and Walter got there at 5 a.m. only to find that no tents or tables were delivered for any of the restaurants. They called everyone they knew, borrowed what they could, and bought the rest at Home Depot – all before the gates opened. Then, no one could forget the year they ran out of beer by 1 p.m., or when the ATMs ran out of money at a cash-only event. When COVID-19 shut down Miami just weeks before the 2020 Deering Seafood Festival, the organizers had to pivot and postpone it multiple times until April 2022.
Some hiccups they can laugh about now. For example, when the crowd doubled in 2007, Pam sent their daughter, Courtney Reeder, who would later become the 2022 and 2023 Deering Seafood Festival chair, to get more buns and fries.
“We didn’t have a restaurant yet and our market was staffed by family,” Reeder said. “My brothers played Howard Palmetto baseball at the time, so to staff our booth, we got a lot of their baseball player friends and friends of my parents to volunteer.”
Courtney grabbed two of the players, piled into Pam’s Expedition, and drove to BJ’s.
“My mom panicked. When I asked her how much I should get, she said, ‘Just get everything they have!’” said Courtney. “The three of us filled two flatbed carts with 20 cases of BJs hamburger buns and cases and cases of fries. We loaded them into the car, but there wasn’t a vendor drop-off spot at the festival then, so we didn’t know how to get them inside. For some reason, my mom had these huge suitcases in the back of her car, so I turned to the boys and yelled, ‘Throw the buns in the suitcases!’ The two boys and I dragged oversized luggage filled with thousands of hamburger buns across the estate to the booth.”
A community that always has each other’s back
It can be hard to explain what makes certain events feel truly special, but at Deering Estate, it always comes down to the people.
“This is truly a community-driven event, hosted by community members in one of the most beautiful and historic waterfront settings in South Florida,” said Yglesias. “There’s an authenticity and sense of place here that you don’t often find elsewhere.”
Nowhere is that spirit more visible than at the seafood festival itself. Behind the scenes, neighbors step in wherever they’re needed – running vendor booths, assisting with parking and shuttles, guiding guests through the historic homes and grounds, and supporting chefs and vendors throughout the day. It’s not uncommon to see children helping serve customers or generations of families volunteering side by side, continuing a tradition rooted deeply in the Deering community.
“As a committee, we made a conscious decision to focus on the visitor experience rather than the bottom line,” Yglesias said. “It was never about turning the festival into a numbers game. It was about creating a high-quality, memorable experience. That ‘friend raiser’ philosophy guided everything we did.”
That same spirit extends through the festival’s local partnerships. Businesses, civic leaders, financial institutions, and volunteers work together to expand family-friendly programming, coordinate logistics, and ensure every detail runs smoothly. In turn, the festival creates meaningful opportunities for local restaurants, chefs, artists, and small businesses to shine, strengthening the very community that has sustained it for two decades.
What resulted is not just an event, but an experience rooted in pride, generosity, and a genuine sense of belonging – one that continues to welcome all of Miami to discover, and rediscover, a true hidden gem along Biscayne Bay.
A milestone anniversary
Twenty years after its humble beginnings as a community “friend raiser,” the award-winning Deering Seafood Festival returns to Deering Estate on Sunday, April 12, 2026, for its biggest celebration yet.
This milestone year blends exciting new activations with nostalgic guest experiences inspired by the festival’s earliest days – from chef demonstrations, Bahamian Junkanoo, and artisan vendors to the Kids Zone, Biscayne Bay boat rides to Chicken Key, and of course, South Florida seafood. Dance to performances by Caribbean Music Farm, I Threes Next Generation, Code Red, Razor Blade Band, and DJ Soso, bands that played at the very first Deering Seafood Festival. The Chef Demo Tent will also bring back some of its early chefs, like Chef Damien Gilchrist of Card Sound Golf Club.
More than a festival, the 20th anniversary is a celebration of the community that built it – and the generations of families, friends, teammates, volunteers, chefs, and local sponsors who helped turn a neighborhood tradition into a South Florida institution.
“It’s incredibly rewarding. I feel a deep sense of gratitude for having had the opportunity to be involved from the early days and to work alongside such passionate and dedicated members of the community,” said Yglesias. “Seeing what the festival has become today is both humbling and inspiring. It’s a testament to what a community can build together.”
About The Deering Estate Foundation
For those who treasure the Deering Estate, who advocate for its preservation and wish to invest in its future, The Deering Estate Foundation provides opportunities for individuals and corporations alike to partake in membership, signature events, and one-of-a-kind experiences, all in service of providing vital funding and support to the Deering Estate. Through these efforts, the foundation fulfills its mission to uphold the legacy of Charles Deering’s cherished 1920s-era property, to provide funding for the cultural, educational and recreational experiences it offers, as well as its significant scientific and archaeological endeavors to conserve its diverse flora, fauna and the eight native ecosystems that thrive on its 450 acres, and to ensure its longevity as a prized American heritage site. Established in 1989, The Deering Estate Foundation, Inc. is a community-based charitable 501(c) 3 Florida Corporation and the philanthropic partner of the Deering Estate. Interested individuals can become a member here!
About Deering Estate
Deering Estate, located at 16701 SW 72 Ave. in Miami, is a 21st Century house museum, cultural and ecological field station, and a national landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places, owned by the State of Florida and managed by Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces Department. Deering Estate is designated as one of seven Miami-Dade County “Heritage Parks” which have a vital role in our community’s history, environment and in providing recreational and cultural experiences.
