Cajun Food Fest 2026 is coming Feb. 7, Long Beach—and its lineup is stacked.
For as much as Ten Mile Brewing gets credit for being Signal Hill’s most dependable neighborhood brewery—and certainly one of the region’s best— its real legacy might be something bigger than beer: it’s quietly become one of Long Beach’s most important small-scale event spaces.
Long before “micro-festivals” became part of the city’s cultural vocabulary, Ten Mile was already hosting them. The fairly new Cambodian Food Fest. The rightfully long-loved Cambodian New Year Festival. It’s Oktoberfest celebration.
Not massive, barricade-lined productions, but approachable, human-sized gatherings where food, community, and local creativity are the point—not necessarily spectacle. Over the years, those events have helped prove that you don’t need a downtown footprint or a corporate sponsor to build something meaningful. You just need a welcoming space, good partners, and a neighborhood willing to show up.
Cajun Fest 2026 fits squarely into that tradition.
Cajun Fest 2026 has a stacked lineup.
On its face, it’s simple: one day, one brewery, a tight lineup of vendors. But the guest list reads like a love letter to Long Beach’s food scene:
- Battambong BBQ bringing its soulful, smoke-kissed Cambodian-American cooking thanks to Chef Chad Phuong, whose incredible story has not only uplifted the entirety of Long Beach’s Cambodian food community but the city’s spirit as well.
- Shady Grove Foods is represented with its deeply personal, nostalgia-driven comfort fare—a genuine way to reconnect with its restaurant for those who miss it.
- Sal’s Gumbo Shack, a pillar of the city’s Black-owned food landscape and one of its most important cultural voices, will serve up Louisiana flavor. (A much-welcomed vendor announcement considering they will soon be shuttering their Bixby Knolls brick-and-mortar.)
- And, for the first time at Cajun Fest, SnoCorner. Home to the city’s best beignets and sno-balls, owner Ashley Monconduit has beautifully and tangibly brought forth the straddling of her Long Beach home and NOLA heritage.
It’s the kind of lineup that could easily anchor a larger festival elsewhere. But that’s the beauty of Ten Mile: it doesn’t scale things up until they lose their soul. You can still talk to the people cooking your food. You can still run into half the city in the courtyard. It’s intimate by design—a refreshing if not much-needed social characteristic as 2026 kicks off. In a city that often measures success by size—bigger crowds, bigger stages, bigger names—Ten Mile Brewing has spent years proving that impact isn’t about how loud you are. It’s about how connected you make people feel.
Why the Cajun Fest—at least for Long Beach—belongs at Ten Mile.
For the Sundstrom family—father and son Dan and Jesse are owners of Ten Mile Brewing—Cajun and Creole culture and cooking are an inherent part of their clan. Dan was a food photographer for two decades, whose subjects created a deep respect for food within the familia. Unquestionably one of those chefs? Chef Paul Prudhomme, whose lauded and seminal “Louisiana Kitchen” cookbook is a Southern must.
And for Jesse, it is one of the most lacking parts in what would otherwise be a thriving Long Beach food culture.
“Long Beach has a fantastic food scene but one cuisine severely lacking is Cajun and Creole food,” Jesse told me when he first launched the annual tradition. “I want to bring a taste of not only the South, but the food I grew up on. Each year, this festival kind of represents a full-circle moment. My father learned from the greatest chefs of our time. He taught me most everything I know about food and now we get to show others what we love.”
Cajun Food Fest 2026 takes place at Ten Mile Brewing’s parking lot, located at 1136 Willow St. in Signal Hill, on Feb. 7 from 11AM to 5PM.
