Plan your visit
This is a guide to eating during festival week, January 21 to 31, 2027. For dates, tickets and venues, the week guide covers the logistics; this page covers the food.
What a screening day does to mealtimes
All eleven screening venues are in Boulder, so your eating follows your screenings, not your hotel. Two consequences worth planning for:
- The pre-screening crush is real and narrow. Everyone attending the same film wants to eat in the same ninety minutes beforehand, within walking distance of the same venue.
- Late food is the hard problem. An evening screening ends when most kitchens have closed. This is the single most useful thing to work out in advance, and the thing we are actively collecting from businesses now.
Boulder: book it, and book it early
Boulder has a James Beard Outstanding Restaurant winner in Frasca and a dense Pearl Street scene that established guides cover in depth. What every one of them agrees on is that the best-regarded rooms are the first to fill: if you want Frasca, Black Cat, Bramble & Hare, Corrida or Oak at Fourteenth during festival week, a reservation is not optional.
For a concentration of options you can walk between without a plan, Pearl Street is the answer, and Avanti’s food hall is the low-commitment version.
Longmont: where this guide is based
Longmont is a quick 25 to 30 minute run north of the venues, and where a lot of festival visitors ended up once Boulder lodging filled. Downtown is locally owned almost end to end, walkable, and easy to park in — which matters more than it sounds like it should at 10pm in January. Our local guide carries the places we have checked.
Festival-week hours
Festival-week hours. Everything in our guide is the business’s published normal hours, checked on the date shown. Festival week will not run like a normal January, so call ahead — and book a table where the room takes bookings.
As answers come in they land on the happenings page and in the guide, each dated.
For the drinking half of the evening — wine bars, breweries, tasting rooms and good options with no alcohol — that is sundance.wine. For dates, tickets and venues, sundanceweekguide.com.
Sources: Sundance Institute venue listings; published reporting on Boulder dining including The Hollywood Reporter and The Scout Guide; each listed business’s own published hours. Checked on the date above.