As part of the aforementioned Canadian media mission, a lively and interactive way of showing San Antonio was to plan a media event in Montreal. The city was strategically chosen as last year we hosted an event in Toronto and try to rotate around. There were similarities between the two events. Both were food driven as having a visiting chef and interactive cooking component is always a great draw.
For Montreal, I brought a bilingual pastry chef from San Antonio and we hosted the event at a boutique cooking school. It was a very intimate and cozy space, almost as if you had walked into someone’s home and that person had a spacious professional kitchen. We were lucky that the staff were great to work with and very accommodating. It’s always a challenge to meticulously plan an event from far away. Their resident chef did all the shopping for our ingredient lists and helped prep and work alongside our guest chef for the event. Support staff such as kitchen help and front-of-house staff is always a huge help with events like these as you need more hands on deck to ensure the event for 20 plus people goes off well. It’s important as once the event starts I wanted as much face time with media as possible so I could tell them all about San Antonio!
We decided on a Thursday brunch event and collaborated with chef on the menu. The menu was a perfect balance of San Antonio’s festive “Tex-Next” food, as we call it, with chef’s personal touch. Prior to arrival, I shipped decor pieces to have on hand so I could enliven the space with some San Antonio spirit—papel picado, paper flowers, embroidered table linens and woven baskets. We even had custom embroidered San Antonio logo aprons for media guests at each of their places at the counter. Everyone donned their apron and got to cooking—it made for some great photos!
The menu consisted of a croissant (a little nod to French heritage) sandwich with black beans, chorizo, guacamole and pico de gallo. Accompaniments were yogurt with dulce de leche and fresh fruit. Parting gifts are always a nice touch, and we decided on Mexican Wedding Cookies. I ordered kraft paper boxes and made custom stickers to brand the boxes. The boxes were then finished with color-coordinated ribbon.
In the end we made a great impression and excited media to visit San Antonio and cover it for their respective outlets by producing a relevant, memorable and fun event.