Alex's Lemonade Stand's Great Chefs Event tonight.

I am so excited to attend this event tonight, and really proud to be bringing my daughter Katie who just graduated from high school and is bound for Johnson & Wales University in Denver. She will be in the Hospitality Management Program, focusing on Special Event and Restaurant Management. This is such a perfect event to take her to, and it will further motivate her for college and her career.

I really enjoy attending and producing this type of event and it is a very unique form of catering from the perspective of the event organizer and the individual restaurant or caterer that participates. It is also very difficult to pull off successfully by the standards that most caterers judge themselves. Factors such as having enough food and beverage, keeping lines short, keeping the flow of the event so that guests can access all areas are difficult when there are dozens of individual food and beverage suppliers and many of them are not practiced in transporting, preparing and serving their products in an off-premise situation.

In my days at Max & Me Catering we developed some great techniques to make these events succeed from our perspective. Some of the similar events I headed up at Max & Me include Governor Rendell's Inaugural Ball in 2003 for almost 12,000 guests; The Red Cross's Red Ball (they still do this at the Please Touch Museum) and Mayor Nutter's Inaugural in 2008. I look forward to seeing how they do tonight. I will report tomorrow on my experience.

There are still tickets available at the door tonight for $300, it benefits a great cause and here are just a few of the chefs that will be there serving their food: Jose Garces, Jen Carroll, Tom Colicchio, Marco Canora, Gabrielle Hamilton, Aaron Sanchez, Daniel Stern, Sue Torres, Jonathan Waxman, Micahel Solomonov, Drew Nieporent, and the host Marc Vetri. Wow.

http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=obkvxteab&oeidk=a07e3dygklr680023dd 

See you there?

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