Is This REALLY A Fundraiser?
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By Greg Baker
There’s nothing quite like the feeling that comes with being invited to do your first prestigious event with other chefs. It’s an affirmation that you’ve done something to get on the radar, that your work is solid, that it’s recognized. Things spiral upward, and one day you’re presenting with a group of other industry people. You realize that you’re the only one on that stage who isn’t receiving an appearance fee, and the irony that you’re not only feeding the machine but that you helped create it comes crashing down on you.
In the last decade, charity fundraisers and food festivals were a required piece of promoting restaurants. Nationally, it’s the hope to attract big press and customers who wouldn’t otherwise travel to someplace like Tampa, where I live. Flying around the country doing dinners and festivals gives you greater affirmation that you’ve leveled up. Soon, you start to divide your calendar; busy season, festival season, slow season, fundraiser season, repeat. Then there are the events you do at home because all the other restaurants are. Customers and the press would note your absence.
Eventually, you realize that your PR efforts have only provided free programming (or worse, pay-to-play) for the organizers of these events. Sure, the better promoters offer some compensation. Travel stipends rarely cover a full plane ticket, let alone all the checked baggage required from traveling with food for 300 people and a knife bag. There’s usually a hotel room. Food stipends are never realistic and require you to go into your pockets to cover ingredient costs, never mind the labor to produce the food. The average festival would cost me $2-3k to participate in.
Worse still is realizing that you’re just feeding rich, weird people in a different place. These were the exact people that you don’t even want in your restaurant to begin with. Here you are catering to them and enduring their shitty behavior and blatant racism (I’m looking at you, every event that I did in Texas) because you’re not the featured talent in their eyes; you’re just the hired help. They paid hundreds of dollars to be there, and they’re going to behave how they want to in return.
I put a hard stop to doing these events in the last year of owning restaurants. The cost/value analysis crumbled quite quickly when I knew that I was getting out and, I thought, why volunteer to subject myself to serving people that I hated and would have gleefully ejected from my own place but had to keep my mouth shut to not reflect poorly on the event?
2020 put the kibosh on these events. I was particularly vocal about needing to put the charity dinner/tasting event to bed for a while, if not forever, as a primary means of fundraising after all that restaurants have suffered in the past year and a half. I’m seeing them rear their heads again and am trepidatious. If they can’t do better than they offered in the past, maybe organizers don’t deserve the participation and free content they formerly enjoyed. In short, if you consider participating in events like these, know your worth and demand it. If you don’t feed them, they will have to change their model or expire. The world values content over content creators—and it’s time to change that.
Headquartered in Fond du Lac, Wis., Society Insurance has been a leading niche insurance carrier since 1915. As a mutual insurance company, Society focuses on the small details that make a big difference to its policyholders while offering top-notch insurance coverage, service and competitive pricing to businesses in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee, Colorado, Georgia and soon Texas.
Greg Baker has spent almost forty years in the hospitality industry. He is a nationally recognized chef and restaurant owner and now works as a restaurant business consultant and food writer.
At the end of the day, he’s just an old cook with an ax to grind and visions of a better future.
Opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the views of Best Served. To achieve our mission of bringing more voices to the table, we are committed to sharing a variety of viewpoints across the industry.
