Taste of the Independents- 5/1/08

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22 Comments

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  Bear May 3, 2008 11:49 am

  swampkitty wrote Just an FYI – I haven’t done a writeup yet, but I’ve already uploaded my pics of the event to Flickr for those of you who want a sneak peek. :)

  The slideshow can be found here

  Wow. Becke, you should contact Liz Lessner and volunteer those photos for promos for next year’s event. I bet they’d really boost attendance.

  CMH Gourmand wrote So – if we want an alternative to expensive food events – we have to create them ourselves. And it is something we can do.

  A good recent example – the Slow Food events – these are about $35.

  Thanks, Jim — and, to follow up on that, the Slow Food events are a good example of the limits of what one can do at this sort of thing. Colleen tries hard to get the best member price she can, and in both cases so far, the restaurants involved have been impressively obliging: I don’t know the specifics of the del Mondo event, but in the case of Alana’s, the food cost as a percentage of the price of the meal was very nearly double what it is on a normal night. But restaurants just don’t do that normally — they can’t, if they want to stay in business. And Slow Food is a nonprofit: for the most part, the member price doesn’t include any profit for the convivium, just a minimal credit card processing fee.

  What that means is that it would be very difficult to apply that model to an event that involves local charities and keep the price-to-value ratio anywhere near the same level without getting the restaurants to take a serious hit or asking people to dig still deeper into their pockets. And even though the Alana’s dinner was a good value, it wasn’t cheap — $75 all-inclusive for members, $85 for nonmembers.

  I would have loved to have gone to Taste, but Colleen and I pay full price at Slow Food dinners too, and the Alana’s dinner and a few other things pretty much tapped us out this month. I was kind of hoping that my stimulus check would arrive in time — this is my kind of way to stimulate the local economy!! — but no dice.

  Anyway, the upshot is, it’s quite surprising, and very frustrating, how quickly the costs mount when you try to put together an event that features really good, local food.
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  Bear May 3, 2008 3:59 pm

  Andrew Hall wrote
  

  maze wrote maybe you should do a story on sour grapes.

  How about a story on people who use their very first post on a web board to make a drive-by, baseless and un-informed attack on a respected member of the community?

  Point right on target, but probably wasted, I’m afraid. Who would bother to snipe at Lisa for complaining that representatives of the traditional media not only don’t parlay their financial advantage into innovation but in fact complain about it? Either someone with ties to traditional media, which despite the aforementioned advantage just can’t keep pace with the expertise of the food bloggers, or someone who is simply fundamentally snide and bitter.

  Either way, my guess is that the “sour grapes” suggestion was made by a connoisseur of same, one who probably won’t be back.