Dinner at Rosecliff: When Newport’s Gilded Age Sets the Table

There are food festivals, and then there are food festivals held in a ballroom conceived for one of the most celebrated hostesses of America’s Gilded Age. At Rosecliff, the distinction matters. Here, wine is poured beneath chandeliers, chefs serve dinner in a room designed for spectacle, and beyond the terrace lies the Atlantic. The setting does not merely accommodate the Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival. It becomes one of its ingredients.

From September 18–20, 2026, the 21st annual Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival returns to Rosecliff with dinners, tastings, brunches, seminars, wine and spirits from around the world, and dishes from regional and visiting chefs. There is also an elegant prelude on September 17: the intimate Connoisseurs’ Dinner in Rosecliff’s dining room, although that event has already sold out. The festival proper begins Friday evening with The Vintner Dinner, a chef collaboration hosted by Maneet Chauhan, the chef, author and longtime Chopped judge. Guests will be seated in Rosecliff’s ballroom for a multi-course dinner, with each course paired with selected wines. 

Saturday changes the rhythm. The morning’s Sips & Sounds brunch pairs regional chefs with a solo pianist before guests move outside to the tasting tent on Rosecliff’s front lawn. That brunch is already sold out, but the evening brings Soirée du Vin, perhaps the event that most naturally suits the house. Rather than remaining seated, guests circulate through Rosecliff’s first-floor rooms with wines, spirits and small plates from regional chefs, accompanied by live music, before moving onto the ocean-facing terrace. On Sunday, Savor & Swing brings a jazz quartet into the ballroom for another chef-curated brunch, followed by tastings outside; that event is sold out as well. 

But to understand why this particular festival is more interesting than another luxury food weekend, one has to understand Rosecliff. The mansion was commissioned in 1899 by Theresa Fair Oelrichs, daughter of Nevada silver magnate James Graham Fair, whose fortune came from the enormously lucrative Comstock Lode. Oelrichs was not simply building a summer residence. She wanted a house capable of staging the elaborate social life for which Newport had become famous. Architect Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White looked to France for his answer, modeling Rosecliff after the Grand Trianon at Versailles, the garden retreat associated with French royalty. Completed in 1902 at a reported cost of $2.5 million, the mansion gave its owner precisely what she required: architecture designed to make entertaining look effortless. 

Rosecliff still possesses Newport’s largest ballroom, along with its celebrated heart-shaped staircase and views toward the Atlantic. Theresa Oelrichs used those spaces exuberantly. The Preservation Society records entertainments ranging from a fairy-tale dinner to an evening featuring Harry Houdini. Decades later, Hollywood recognized the theatrical possibilities immediately. Rosecliff appeared in films including High Society, The Great Gatsby, True Lies and Amistad; its ballroom provided an appropriately extravagant setting for the parties in the 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. 

That history gives the Wine & Food Festival an intriguing continuity. The Gilded Age mansion was itself a machine for entertaining. Dining was never merely about food. A dinner communicated wealth, taste, social standing and cosmopolitan sophistication through menus, wines, flowers, china, servants, music, clothing and architecture. The guest was meant to consume the entire performance. More than a century later, a chef collaboration beneath Rosecliff’s chandeliers inevitably echoes that choreography; even if the social world surrounding it has changed completely.

There is another French-American layer worth noticing. A weekend devoted to gastronomy and wine unfolds inside an American mansion modeled on Versailles, built with money produced by the American West. That combination is quintessentially Newport. The great houses along Bellevue Avenue were not simply attempts to reproduce Europe; they reveal how newly powerful Americans borrowed European architectural languages and adapted them to express their own wealth and aspirations. At Rosecliff, a French royal retreat became the inspiration for the home of a Nevada silver heiress; and now serves as the backdrop for an American culinary festival. Culture has a way of traveling. 

Visitors arriving this September can also encounter Rosecliff in the context of the United States’ 250th anniversary. The mansion is hosting “Revolution Reimagined: Evolving Stories from Newport’s Past,” running from June 26 through November 1, 2026. The exhibition is part of the Preservation Society’s broader examination of Newport and American history during the semiquincentennial year. That gives travelers an opportunity to make the weekend about more than food and wine: Rosecliff becomes an entry point into architecture, collecting, social history and the changing ways historic houses interpret the past. 

The practical advice is to plan carefully. Demand is clearly strong: the Connoisseurs’ Dinner, Saturday brunch and Sunday jazz brunch are currently listed as sold out. At the time of writing, the Friday Vintner Dinner and Saturday evening Soirée du Vin remain listed with ticket information on the official festival page, but availability can change. The Preservation Society also says its 2026 seminar lineup will be announced in late August. 

Yet the appeal of the weekend extends beyond obtaining a reservation to every event. Newport in September offers something high summer cannot quite provide. The season begins to turn, the pace changes, and these extravagant houses can be experienced as something more than tourist attractions. Rosecliff, especially, rewards attention: to the sweep of the staircase, the proportions of the ballroom, the French reference embedded in its architecture and the Atlantic waiting beyond the terrace.

Come for Maneet Chauhan. Come for the vintners, the small plates or the jazz. Raise a glass beneath the chandeliers and imagine the extraordinary dinners that once unfolded in the same rooms. But every so often, look up from the plate. At Rosecliff, the setting has always been one of the courses.

Sources:

• Newport Mansions / Preservation Society of Newport County — Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival: A Weekend at Rosecliff 

• Newport Mansions / Preservation Society of Newport County — Rosecliff: History 

• Discover Newport — The 2026 Newport Mansions Wine + Food Festival 

• Discover Newport — Rosecliff and 2026 programming 

• Newport Historical Society — Newport on Film