Walk down Pine Street on a Friday evening in September and you already know the rhythm: tasting room doors propped open, a line forming outside whichever spot has the patio heater on, someone's dog waiting patiently outside Pine Street Bistro while their owner grabs a coffee. Nobody feeds a meter. The city currently runs no paid parking program downtown, so the only real cost of an evening out is deciding where to park your feet.
That routine is about to get a new addition. From September 18 through 20, The Ava Hotel is debuting Epic Fest Paso Robles, a three-day culinary and beverage festival built around the hotel's own restaurants and a lineup of chefs and winemakers who don't usually share a stage. The marketing leans hard on overnight packages, room tiers, and a VIP level that bundles nearly a thousand dollars in food and beverage credit into the stay. If you only read the hotel's own site, you'd assume the only way in is to book a room. The schedule itself says otherwise, and that gap is worth understanding if you already live within walking distance of Pine Street.
Epic Fest runs across four venues that are all part of The Ava Hotel's footprint: the hotel itself, EMRE, Esperanza on the Rooftop, and Pine Street Bistro. The culinary direction at EMRE comes from chef Julien Asseo, who trained in Bordeaux and spent time as executive chef at Restaurant Guy Savoy in Las Vegas before bringing his family's L'Aventure Winery lineage to Paso. He's paired for several events with Casey McMinn, a Central Coast native who cooked at State Bird Provisions in San Francisco before landing at The Hatch downtown and now runs the kitchen at The Ava.
The opening night belongs to chefs Nate Lopez and Kevin Martinez, who take over the Harvest Opening Party on the Esperanza Rooftop with a live DJ and mariachi as the sun goes down. Winery and distillery excursions bring in DAOU, JUSTIN, and Booker, three producers whose names carry weight well beyond the festival weekend. Rachel Haggstrom, executive chef at the Restaurant at JUSTIN, the only winery restaurant in California to hold a Michelin star, rounds out the culinary roster.
This is a debut. The Ava is Paso Robles' newest lifestyle-branded hotel, and Epic Fest is its first attempt at a festival of this scale rather than another one-off dinner series. Whether it becomes a fixture on the calendar or stays a one-time thing is impossible to know yet. Right now, all anyone can say for certain is what September 2026 looks like.
It's easy to conflate Epic Fest with the region's bigger, older tradition, and worth untangling before you build a weekend around the wrong assumption. Harvest Wine Month is a designation the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance has used for years to cover the entire month of October, when more than a hundred wineries across the appellation run their own individual events: grape stomps, barrel tastings, winemaker dinners, the works. Harvest Wine Weekend, the marquee stretch of that month, typically lands on the third weekend of October, which puts it around October 17 through 19 in 2026.
Epic Fest is a different animal entirely. It's a single hotel's three-day program that wraps up nearly two weeks before Harvest Wine Month even starts, and a full month ahead of Harvest Wine Weekend itself. That timing isn't an accident. A mid-September date lets The Ava capture attention during the actual crush, when fruit is coming in and the story is freshest, without competing for oxygen against a hundred-plus wineries all running events at once in October. If you're the kind of local who already blocks out mid-October for the bigger harvest sprawl, know that Epic Fest is its own separate weekend, not a preview of it.
Here's the part the hotel's marketing buries. The Ava's own event page pitches the room package as the best way to see the whole weekend, then adds, almost as an aside, that guests are free to build their own itinerary instead. That second half is the one that matters if you already have a bed four blocks away.
Several of the weekend's signature moments are bookable individually, no room required. Based on how the festival has laid out its schedule, here's roughly how a downtown resident could piece together the weekend without touching the hotel's booking page for a room:
What's not confirmed as standalone is the Maker's Tasting & Live Music session and the winery excursions to DAOU, JUSTIN, and Booker, both of which read as perks tied more closely to the overnight packages. If those matter to you specifically, it's worth calling the hotel directly before assuming either way.
The practical upshot: a Pine Street resident can walk to four or five of the weekend's headline events, pay for exactly the ones they want, and sleep in their own bed afterward. The room package is genuinely the better deal if you're flying in from out of the area and want the rooftop pool and the $980 in food and beverage credit that comes with the VIP tier. If you already live two minutes from EMRE's front door, you're paying for square footage you don't need.
Here's the detail that makes this worth planning around rather than just noting on a calendar. Whale Rock Music & Arts Festival, the region's long-running harvest tradition, lands on September 19 and 20 this year. That's not a nearby weekend or a loose seasonal overlap. Those are two of the same three days Epic Fest is running.
Whale Rock has been going since 2013, when the Udsen family at Castoro Cellars threw a 30th-anniversary party they called Beaverstock, a name they had to drop a few years later once Woodstock's attorneys noticed. This year is the 13th annual festival, run at Castoro Cellars a few miles south of downtown Paso in Templeton, with two stages of live music, a gallery of local artists, all-ages yoga, a silent disco, kids' crafts, and proceeds benefiting the Templeton Instrumental Music Boosters Association. Kids four and under get in free, five to twelve for ten dollars with a paid adult ticket. Bring a low chair and a blanket. Nobody is checking a room reservation at the gate.
Epic Fest is the opposite instinct entirely: curated, reservation-heavy, priced for people who want a chef's tasting menu rather than a food truck plate on a lawn. Both events are legitimately excellent versions of a Paso September, and both are happening on the same Saturday. If you're local and you only have one Saturday to give, that's a real choice, not a false one. A family headed to Templeton for the silent disco and the wine boosters fundraiser is not going to also make the Harvest Table dinner downtown that same night. Know which version of the weekend you actually want before you commit to either one.
The Saturday morning farmers market in Downtown City Park will run exactly as it always does, same produce stalls, same familiar vendors, whether or not you have an Epic Fest reservation that afternoon. That's the part worth remembering. New events arrive in this town fairly often. The rhythm underneath them, the market, the walkable blocks, the absence of a parking meter between you and dinner, is the thing that doesn't change from one festival to the next.
If a weekend like this makes you think more seriously about what it's actually like to live where the harvest happens instead of just visiting it, Hertha Wolff-Arend works with buyers and sellers across Paso Robles, Templeton, Atascadero, and the Lake Nacimiento area every day. Reach out to request a personalized country-home consultation and valuation when you're ready to talk specifics.
