Recession be damned, as three major festivals show that a little thing like a financial meltdown can’t stop New Yorkers from indulging in their favorite culinary delights.
Businesses are closing. Jobs are disappearing. Wall Street and the banks have spent much of the last twelve months in a seemingly downward spiral (except for their top executives, but that’s a topic for another article).
With the economy suffering the effects of a lengthy free-fall, it hardly seems the time for a fancy — and costly — extravaganza.
Artwork by Chris Kalb
And yet, this October brings three such events to town, each presenting the finest chefs, food, and drink New Yorkers have been able to partake in at one time since….well, since last October. Much about these events costs a pretty non-recessionary dollar, and yet all three seem to be having little problem selling tickets.
Is this yet another sign that the recession is quickly becoming a thing of the past? Or does it show that in an era when chefs are celebrities, the passion of the foodie is one of the few genuinely recession-proof commodities?
On October 3 and 4, New York Magazine and the French Culinary Institute present the second annual New York Culinary Experience which, for the all-in price of $1,395, allows participants to cook alongside great chefs including David Pasternack, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Jacques Torres, Jacques Pépin, and Iron Chef Morimoto, among others.
The following weekend, October 8-11, the Food Network presents the also second annual New York City Wine & Food Festival, a melange of culinary demonstrations, wine tastings, and a massive open air event appropriately titled the Grand Tasting. Festival participants range from Martha Stewart to Rachael Ray to Bobby Flay, among many others, and prices for the more than 100 events run from $10 to $500.
Photographer Romulo Yanes and Gourmet Food Stylist and Editor Paul Grimes hold court at last year’s Gourmet Institute.
Culinary warriors then get a two-week break to fast and recover before Gourmet Magazine’s Gourmet Institute. Now in its seventh year, the Institute, which runs October 23-25, also features a dazzling array of events at a wide range of prices ($20-$300), including seminars, demos, tastings, classes, walking tours, and a weekend-long Gourmet Marketplace, with participating chefs for Institute events to include Anthony Bourdain, April Bloomfield, Scott Conant, Sara Moulton and more.
Those who are flush enough to attend all three may get a sense of culinary deja vu, since several chefs will be doing double, or in some cases even triple duty. Vongerichten, for example, will be at both the Gourmet Institute and the New York Culinary Experience, and The Spotted Pig and the John Dory’s Bloomfield is a listed participant for all three.
All of which leads us to wonder if there’s enough business to go around. The organizers of these events seem to believe that there will be more than enough consumer dollars for all, as long as people continue to love eating and drinking — and, as long as each event makes a concerted effort to give consumers their money’s worth, and to distinguish itself from the competition.
The founders of the New York Culinary Experience (NYCE) cite the unique intimacy of their weekend as justification for their high price tag.
“The Wine & Food Festival is a big crush, isn’t it?” asks Dorothy Hamilton, founder and CEO of the French Culinary Institute. “There are lots of demos, and you’re one of many, many people. It’s not hands-on cooking, and the Gourmet Institute is also not hands-on. It’s a smaller venue, and I believe they have, like, six chefs they invite. We have something like twenty-five over a two-day period.”
NYCE attendees prepare and cook entire meals with the help of master chefs in groups of 24. They can take home what they make, and mingle with both chefs and fellow students at private receptions following the classes.
The event was partly inspired by the French Culinary Institute’s extensive resources.
“The fact that the Institute has a 76,000-square-foot facility in the heart of Manhattan in Soho, we thought was a unique asset,” says Hamilton, who co-founded the NYCE with New York Magazine’s culinary editor, Gillian Duffy. “We have these major teaching kitchens that can fit between 20 and 24 people in a kitchen, each with its own individualized working station, and the teacher is in the classroom with them. So, for example, they’re going to have Morimoto in a class, showing them how he cuts sushi, and then they go back to their station and get their own piece of tuna, and he’ll look at each of them in their station. It’s just extraordinary.”
Michael Psilakis from Anthos works with a lucky participant at last year’s New York Culinary Experience.
“Nobody else does this,” adds Duffy, “and it’s wonderful to see the relationship between the chefs and the students, and to see these students in awe at having a class with somebody like Jean-Georges.”
But while the NYCE may win the intimacy battle, Hamilton is way off on her approximation of what the Gourmet Institute has to offer. Until this year, the Institute had the same all-or-nothing price structure as the NYCE — last year’s price was $1,395 — for small group seminars with master chefs.
This year, though, in response to the hard economic times, the Gourmet Institute has completely revamped its program. Institute events include a cooking class with Sara Moulton, walking tours with Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, a crudo demonstration with David Pasternack, and many more — with all available as individual purchases — but they’re also introducing the Gourmet Marketplace, a one-stop bazaar with book signings, tastings, seminars, and more for only a $20 admission fee, or free to registrants of any other event.
And while the NYCE lists 28 chef participants, the Gourmet Institute lists 62.
“It was a high-ticket item that, in this economy, may be too rich,” says Nancy Berger Cardone, VP and publisher of Gourmet Magazine, of last year’s ticket price. “But also, we really wanted people to have an opportunity to experience it, to open it up to a larger number of New Yorkers who have read about it and seen it. We were so limited in terms of the number of people we could have, and we’ll probably triple to quadruple the number of people the event will touch.”
For the Food Network’s New York Wine & Food Festival, which originated its multi-event, big tent format at its annual South Beach festival before bringing it to New York last year, the challenge is similar — opening the event up to a larger crowd. According to founding director Lee Schrager, while the festival had somewhere between seventy and eighty events last year, this year’s will host almost 120.
“We got great feedback last year,” says Schrager, “but if anything, our big complaint was that we were sold out of tickets, and people couldn’t come. That was the most negative thing we heard.”
Tom Colicchio from Craft and “Top Chef” at the Wine & Food Fest’s 2008 Burger Bash.
So this year, in addition to events like the Burger Bash hosted by Rachael Ray, where many of the city’s top chefs present their unique take on the burger, there will also be a Meatball Madness event hosted by Giada De Laurentiis featuring around 25 top chefs offering their own variation on the Italian classic. Those with a hankering for down home cooking can partake in Paula Deen’s Down South Up North at Hill Country for a sample of all sorts of barbeque and other southern cuisine, and chocoholics can revel at the Jacques Torres & Friends Chocolate Brunch.
There will also be the return of favorites like opening night’s Chelsea Market After Dark, which will be hosted this year by Food Network personality Guy Fieri.
“Being able to hang out and see the chefs at a party that’s so central to food and beverage naturally creates an air of excitement,” says Fieri. “Some people get the feeling you get at the Super Bowl, when the whole air is sports and football and so forth. This is, all around, the thing I love the most, which is cooking and eating food. It just puts that vibe out there.”
In increasing opportunities for participants, Schrager said his festival has been sensitive to recessionary issues and has kept prices level, if not even lowered them, across the board. Last year, for instance, an intimate dinner with Alain Ducasse was $750. This year, that same, already sold-out event went for $400.
But wherever ticket prices stand, all three festivals seem to be bucking the trend of people squirreling away their dollars in the face of hard times. While the NYCE had about 75 or 80 participants last year, it has already sold 90 tickets at press time, according to Hamilton, with about ten weeks to go (capacity is 150, up from closer to 100 last year).
Schrager reports that while he’s had to work harder for sponsorship dollars, every indication points to this event surpassing last year’s in terms of both sponsors and ticket sales, with a twenty percent expected bump in overall attendance. The Gourmet Institute, with its new format, expects to jump from around 325 attendees last year to well over 1,000 this year.
So is this a sign of an improving economy, or, given the intense foodie nature of New York City, is the allure of fine cuisine and celebrity chefs simply too strong for an economic downturn to conquer?
The NYCE founders see the answer as a little bit of both.
Katie Lee Joel and Guy Fieri laughing it up at last year’s Burger Bash.
“Even if we’re getting to double-digit unemployment, that’s still a majority of people who are employed,” says Hamilton. “Last year, people were saying, ‘what’s going to happen to my job? Are we going to make it through this?’ So everyone was a little afraid, and they were holding back. Now that the financial institutions look a bit more stable, people look at their companies saying, ‘it looks like we made it through the dark days. I’m gonna keep my job.’ So they’re spending more of their discretionary income.”
Duffy, who calls inaugurating their event last October, just as the financial collapse was kicking in, “a bit nerve-wracking,” now believes that not only are events like these recession-proof, but that the recession may be increasing their popularity.
“People need an outlet during these times, and during a recession, they want to learn how to cook,” she says. “They’ll go home and recreate these things. More and more food events are happening in the city [because] the one thing that can take their minds off the pressure is food. Julia Child, in her film [‘Julie & Julia’], says, ‘oh my god, I just love to eat.’ That’s what people are like in New York. It’s the foodie city.”
“People really have a heightened interest in food and in the chef world, so it’s a very relevant conversation,” says Berger Cardone. “People are cooking more, wine and spirits certainly get consumed more during [recessionary] times, and people want to spend quality time with family and friends. At the end of the day, that’s what [the Gourmet Institute] does, and that’s why there’s so much excitement around it.”
Schrager also sees the recession as possibly assisting events like these, in that they sometimes serve as substitutes for pricier vacations.
“Rather than traveling out of town on Columbus Day weekend, people are staying,” he says. “There’s so much buzz on food and wine that people who appreciate wine and food and great spirits save up, and maybe they give up something else. Maybe people who would have gone to Europe are coming to Manhattan and going to the festival.”
Fieri, though, feels that the success of these events boils down to one thing and one thing only — that New York City’s love of all things epicurean means that there’s plenty of room for everyone, as long as they successfully give New Yorkers the absolute best that the food world has to offer.
“New York really is the [culinary] epicenter, and different events bring different themes, directions, and energies,” says Fieri. “You have more restaurants here per capita, and with all the millions of people that come in and out of the city, it can withstand multiple events.”
Larry Getlen is the Editor-in-Chief of City Scoops magazine. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/larrygetlen.
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