By Ian Roven, Howdy's Malibu
Autumn 2026
There is a photograph from Labor Day weekend that does more work than this entire article will. A full rainbow, both feet on the ground, one in the Santa Monica Mountains and one somewhere past Pacific Coast Highway, with the whole Cook-Off sitting small beneath it. If you had been standing in six inches of mud an hour earlier, it registered rather differently than it does on a screen.
That rainbow is the shape of the weekend. It is also, if we are honest about it, the shape of the last several years in this town.
Friday: the town shows up
The 43rd Malibu Chili Cook-Off opened Friday afternoon, and Friday belongs to the locals. It always has. Before the holiday crowd finds the parking, before the lines get serious, it is your neighbors, your kids' teachers, the man who repaired your water heater in February, the people you waved to across a road closure. The entire town catches up inside the same forty-foot stretch of gravel between the chili tents and the music stage.
We were there with Howdy's Malibu, serving two entries: the Philly Chili, our meat version, and the Breezy Chili, our vegan one. It was a fine night. Easy, loud, warm, precisely what a Friday in September is supposed to be.
Saturday: a full house
Saturday brought the crowd. The weather was preposterous in the way only Malibu manages, bright and warm and flattering to everything it touched, the sort of six o'clock light that has talked more than one visitor into reconsidering where they live. The rides ran. The stage ran. Chili moved. There was a stretch in the middle of the afternoon when the grounds stood shoulder to shoulder and you could feel the entire apparatus running exactly as intended.
Every vendor on that field had some version of the same thought: this is going to be a very good year.
Sunday: rain, rain, mud
Then the most Malibu thing happened. It rained. In summer. On Labor Day weekend. In Malibu.
The remnants of Hurricane Marie moved up the coast Sunday morning and delivered rain, wind, and lightning to a town that measures its September rainfall in hundredths of an inch. The National Weather Service issued a flood advisory covering eastern Malibu and the Franklin and Palisades burn scars. By late afternoon the county had temporarily closed the beaches on account of lightning. Beaches. Closed. On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend.
The grounds turned to mud. Not picturesque mud. The variety that swallows a folding table leg and keeps a shoe as a souvenir. By afternoon a Bobcat was working the midway in front of the Ferris wheel, which is not a sentence anyone anticipates writing about the first weekend in September.
Sunday was called. Organizers announced it that morning and made Sunday tickets good for Monday instead.
If you want to understand what that means for a small vendor, do the arithmetic. Sunday of Labor Day weekend is not one quarter of the weekend. It is the anchor of it. Product had been bought, portioned, and staffed against that day. Vendors were displaced, canopies were soaked, inventory sat. Nobody was thrilled.
And here is the part worth recording: nobody around us spent the afternoon hard-focused on that.
Sunday, second half: the most Malibu thing happened
What actually filled those hours was people moving water.
Squeegees, push brooms, plywood, sandbags, whatever anyone happened to have in a truck. Anawalt Malibu opened their doors and provided tarps. Someone always turns up with the right tool and no particular reason to be helping you. Volunteers scheduled for four hours stayed for eight. A fair number of the people working hardest back there were teenagers, driving brown water off tarps in the drizzle while the adults wrestled the tents.
And once the water was moved, everybody ate.
The vendors began trading. Chili for chili, chili for whatever was sitting in somebody's cooler that had no chance of surviving the night. Restaurants that spend the other fifty-one weekends of the year competing for the same customer stood in the back passing each other hotel pans, and nobody was keeping score, and nobody was pitching. If you can believe it, the back kitchen was a masterclass in love and support.
That is not a small thing to have witnessed. A washed-out Sunday is a bad day for every single business on that field, and the instinct back there was to feed one another.
We have done this before. That is precisely the point.
This town has spent the better part of a decade rolling up its sleeves. The Woolsey Fire. The Franklin Fire. The Palisades Fire. The rains and slides that followed, because that is the sequence here, invariably. Burn scar, then rain, then mud, then the road, then the long unglamorous business of putting things back. The same flood advisory that closed a chili festival on Sunday was pointed at the exact ground that burned.
So when the sky opened over the Cook-Off, it was not a new problem. It was an old one in festival clothes.
And the response was equally familiar. Move the water. Move the mud. Move the negativity, which is heavier than either and requires more people to lift. Then determine what can still be salvaged.
Monday: open on time
We opened Monday at 1 p.m. On time.
That sentence looks modest. It was not. Between Sunday's mud and Monday's gates lay a night of work by a great many people whose names appear on no banner: the grounds crew, the ride operators, the Boys & Girls Club staff and volunteers, the vendors who arrived early to rebuild a booth from nothing. The competition was held. The judging happened. It was our first year entering, and our Breezy Chili, the vegan one, took third place, which we have elected to read as a verdict on the entire weekend. People arrived by the thousand, redeemed their Sunday tickets, and ate chili in the sunshine as though the previous day had been a rumor.
Not everyone was there.
Some booths stayed dark on Monday. The cost of a lost day is not distributed evenly. For some operators it amounts to a disappointing weekend; for others it is product spoiled, staff already paid, a load-out already completed, and no arithmetic under which a second load-in makes sense. That is true of a rained-out festival and it is true of every fire and slide this community has absorbed. Recovery is never uniform. Some people get back up on Monday and some do not, and the ones who do not are generally those who could least afford the blow to begin with.
It bears saying plainly, in an article about coming together, that the weekend did not end the same way for everybody. Any honest account of resilience has to include the people it failed to reach.
There is an irony here worth naming, because it is the generous kind. Labor Day is the one holiday organized around the proposition that work deserves rest. It is also, for anyone who runs a restaurant, a farm stand, a carnival ride, or a nonprofit, among the most laborious days of the year. Somebody has to work so that everybody else can gather. That is not a complaint. It is very close to a definition of community: a rotating agreement about whose turn it is to do the hauling.
About the Boys & Girls Club
All of this exists because the Boys & Girls Club of Malibu puts it on, and 100% of the net proceeds return to the Club.
That means youth programs. Mental health and wellness services. Long-term disaster recovery for families who lost homes in the Woolsey, Franklin and Palisades fires, which is to say the very work described three paragraphs ago, carried out year-round by professionals rather than by whoever happens to be standing nearby with a squeegee.
The Club had the hardest job on the grounds. When weather turns, an organizer is holding a rope with a hundred people pulling on either end: vendors who need the day, ticket holders who paid for it, sponsors, county officials, a fire department reading a lightning map. They kept it open as long as it was safe to keep open, they closed it when it was not, and then they had everyone back on their feet by 1 p.m. Monday.
To the BGCM staff and volunteers: thank you. Not the courteous kind. The kind you offer people you watched work.
One ask before you go
The recovery did not conclude when the gates closed Monday night. Some of the people who worked that weekend are still absorbing it, and a few will be absorbing it for months.
So, respectfully: put down the pitchforks.
If you came away from the weekend with a grievance, sit with it a moment and then recall why you bought a ticket in the first place.
Second-guessing a weather call costs nothing. Making one, with lightning over the water and a flood advisory sitting on the burn scars, costs a great deal. The people obliged to make those calls were making them on a holiday, in the rain, on behalf of a youth organization.
And here is the practical matter. There is a 44th Chili Cook-Off only if the people who ran the 43rd are willing to do it again. That crew has to load in, court sponsors, pull permits, and stand in the weather one more time, and nobody volunteers twice to serve as the town's lightning rod. We need the BGCM staff to come back next year stronger than they were this one. That does not happen on its own. It happens because they finish this one knowing the town stood behind them.
If you want somewhere to put the feeling, there are better destinations for it. Go eat at the businesses that stood out there in the mud. Give to BGCM directly, apart from a ticket price. Either will accomplish more than a comment thread ever has.
What the rainbow is actually about
At RE-BU, we spend most of our time on the unglamorous machinery of rebuilding. Permits. Debris. Insurance. Contractors. Timelines that slip, and slip again. It is slow, it is largely invisible, and it photographs terribly.
Which is exactly why a rainbow over a muddy fairground on Labor Day weekend belongs on a front page. It is the same story compressed into 72 hours, at a scale where you can actually watch it happen: disaster arrives, it is genuinely bad, people show up for one another without being asked, and the thing reopens for my wife and daughters to come see their dad serve the community.
Malibu was not handed a good weekend. Malibu got three good days, one ruined one, and a town that declined to let the ruined one stand as the ending.
Smiles. Fun. Chili.
The most Malibu thing happened. Then it happened again, and the second time was better.
See you all next year.
Special thanks
The Howdy's crew: Caleb, Isaac, and Josh (especially Josh), along with Chef Rell, Philly's very own, which explains a great deal about the Philly Chili.
Boys & Girls Club of Malibu: Kasey, Molly, and Siugen, and everyone else who spent their weekend making everybody else's weekend possible.
FTR: Lizzy.
The Aviator Nation Dreamland crew: for all of it.
Ian Roven is the owner-operator of Howdy's Malibu. To learn more about the Malibu Chili Cook-Off, visit malibuchilicookoff.org.