The Malaysia International Gourmet Festival (MIGF) is the country’s premier fine dining event featuring Malaysia’s very best restaurants. Commencing in 2001, the festival started to breathe life into what was then a very small fine dining scene. Though Malaysians had always enjoyed dining out, the preference in those days was almost exclusively for more traditional restaurants and hawker food. There were only a few fine dining restaurants in the country and not many were doing well for the simple reason there was not a big enough base of local diners to draw upon.

From the outset, therefore, the festival’s aims were two-fold: to increase the size of the population of fine diners for mutual benefit, and to create sustained interest in Malaysia’s fine dining scene.

During the festival, restaurants put aside their highly competitive differences and join together in a collective marketing effort. Rather than bringing in chefs from overseas for a limited food promotion, the festival’s firm focus is on the skills of world-class chefs already resident in Malaysia. This emphasises the all-year-round quality of our restaurants—a vital factor in encouraging more locals to dine out throughout the year.

Special festival menus sold at special festival prices help attract a new generation of diners and persuade existing diners to try different venues and dine out more often. These month-long deals and offers aim to make fine dining in Malaysia accessible to everyone.

Festival awards also give valuable recognition to the country’s top food and beverage professionals and encourage more young people to take up careers in the hospitality industry.

Completing the picture, the Festival is heavily publicised overseas, selling Malaysia as a top food tourism destination. Earlier this year, the Festival organiser, Asia Reach Media was awarded one of the hospitality industry’s most coveted international prizes—the PATA (Pacific Asia Travel Association) Gold Award for Marketing in the Industry Category. The festival has also been recognised by Tourism Malaysia as one of the country’s top 50 official events for Visit Malaysia Year 2007. Simply put it’s an invitation to dine with the best!

For links to past Festival websites, please visit our archives page.