From Luxury Dining to Cultural Food Identity: Food Festivals and Culinary Destination Repositioning in Qatar

This article examines how food festivals contribute to culinary destination repositioning in Qatar by broadening the destination image beyond luxury dining towards a more culturally grounded food identity. Although Doha is widely associated with premium hospitality and upscale restaurant experiences, recent festival developments indicate a parallel emphasis on public culinary events that foreground heritage, memory and cultural expression. The study adopts a qualitative multiple case approach focused on the Qatar International Food Festival (QIFF) and the Throwback Food Festival at Old Doha Port. It draws on participant observation across multiple festival editions, semistructured interviews with festival organizers, vendors, and attendees, and published promotional materials. Four interconnected themes were identified: curated authenticity, heritage performance, culinary nostalgia, and destination image diversification. The study develops curated authenticity as an analytical concept describing how institutions deliberately select and arrange cultural cues that visitors may experience as genuine. This process-level lens complements staged, constructivist, and existential approaches by foregrounding the interaction between curatorial design and visitor interpretation without assuming deception. The two cases suggest that food festivals can function as strategic platforms for culinary identity construction at the intersection of state-led destination branding and lived cultural expression. Situated within the political economy of post-oil tourism development, the analysis offers context-specific insights from Qatar while identifying opportunities for comparative research across the wider Gulf region.