SOUTH BEACH WINE & FOOD FESTIVAL HISTORY
The festival began in 1997, when it was a one-day FIU School of Hospitality fundraiser called the Florida Extravaganza. Back then, the shindig took place at the Kovens Conference Center on FIU's North Miami campus, and, as is still the case, was cosponsored by Southern Wine & Spirits. It drew about 450 people. The extravaganza would eventually widen to three days and attract a few thousand guests, but 2002, Lee Brian Schrager, director of special events and media relations at Southern, relocated the fest to SoBe, renamed it the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, and rebranded it to tie in with that sizzling neighborhood's increasingly trendy cachet.
About 7,000 folks attended the first official SBWFF, which featured seminars, dinners, and the Dom Perignon-sponsored Grand Tasting Tent. Participating chefs included local stars Michelle Bernstein, Hedy Goldsmith, Robin Haas, Cindy Hutson, Mark Militello, Allen Susser and Norman Van Aken, as well as national headliners such as Gary Danko, Alain Ducasse, Todd English, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa and Francois Payard.
One of the inaugural guests, New York Magazine food writer Hal Rubenstein, came to town to take part in a panel discussion on restaurant reviewing and ended up with cops tossing him over an all-terrain vehicle and leading him away in handcuffs. Reports had it that the New Yorker was being a bit too New Yorkish while attempting to push his way into the Grand Tasting Tent. After a two-hour holding session, he was released with a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. The ordeal no doubt cost the scribe more than the entrance fee would have — back then, it was $50 at the door, $40 in advance. (Now it's $212.50.)
The following year, when close to 10,000 people reveled in the effervescent festivities, another unforeseen incident unfolded. This one involved chef Gordon Ramsay, who apparently didn't fancy some punk journalist taking top billing in the SBWFF historical highlight reel. The brash Brit was to give two seminars and prepare a lavish $300-per-plate dinner at Smith & Wollensky. After allegedly stopping in for a few drinks at Ted's Hideaway on his way from hotel to steak house, the irascible Ramsay walked into the Smith & Wollensky kitchen and, according to Brian Malloy, then executive chef at Nikki Beach Club, "took a look around and said something like, 'Fuck this South Beach shit.''' Then Gordo left the restaurant and boarded a plane back home without bothering to inform festival organizers or even his publicists. The dinner went on without him.
Such flamboyances only fueled the marketing machine, and attendance at the following fest doubled to 20,000. The breadth of the gathering would continue to expand along with national attention and money raised. Then, during the planning of the 2007 festival — get your umbrellas out — came watershed moment number two: The ever-shrewd Schrager enticed the Food Network to enter into a partnership with the SBWFF and become its title sponsor.
Whether bigger has meant better might be a matter for debate, but the Food Network's salubrious effect on fundraising is not. Last year's four-day affair drew 53,000 participants, created 1.7 billion media impressions, and brought in $4 million. Beneficiaries are industry-related projects of the cosponsors, such as the Southern Wine & Spirits Beverage Management Center and FIU's School of Hospitality and Tourism Management Teaching Restaurant. About $400,000 is specifically earmarked for student scholarships. (If you've spent nights worrying that hotel chains such as Marriott and Hyatt might run out of food and beverage directors, you can relax now.) To date, more than $8 million has been forked over to Florida International University, which refers to the SBWFF as "FIU School of Hospitality's annual fundraiser, which also happens to be the nation's largest wine and food festival."
It isn't as though FIU doesn't work hard for the money. More than a thousand of its students are involved in every aspect of the event, from managing the massive logistics to doing whatever physical labor is required to make the festival run — which includes soliciting restaurants for the Grand Tastings; receiving, directing, and storing the tons of food that gets shipped in; and prepping it all for a hungry 50,000 customers.
