Sizzle Restaurant Week
Services needed: Event creation | Event management | Marketing | Advertising | Non-Profit
HISTORY
At the end of 2014, I had just finished a contract as a traveling restaurant bar trainer for a hospitality group. During that time I worked across the Midwest and Northeast traveling to below performing restaurants to evaluate, hire, fire, and train them to corporate standards.
Sure, the experience was unmatched to anything I've done in my early 20's (and useful later on in my career) but the real takeaway was being able to experience different cities, people, and, cultures. Something I may have missed on if I didn't take the job initially.
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Until then, I always associated culture with ethnicity, not by region or demographic. Raised in a Filipino and Puerto Rican household and growing up in the metropolitan Jersey/NY area, diversity and culture was normal. Food is a way of life. Flavor is everywhere.
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Traveling to other cities, it only heightened my senses.
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Restaurant Week was an event I first discovered in Detroit circa '12. Then again in Chicago, Cincinnati, and once more in Charleston. By then I was hooked. Working the hospitality side, it was interesting to see during the slowest times of the year for restaurants, this multi-week event created almost Super Bowl like anticipation for the food lover community.
As a patron, I loved witnessing peoples excitement to be in places they've never been before, sharing food, meeting chefs, a real community feeling.
Then in 2014, I was a bartender at Tommy Bahama in downtown Naples and I was talking to guests, sharing my travel stories. I lightly mentioned I was excited for Restaurant Week here in the area when I received the response "What's that?".
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Restaurant Week didn't exist here.
The next week I bought the domain name Naples Bites and called 12 different Restaurant Weeks across the US. Using a fake restaurant name, I told each one I was a new restaurant looking to join. Every coordinator sent us their decks. I didn't know what I was doing, I just figured why reinvent the wheel. With all the decks laid across my kitchen counter, I picked the best of each business model and boom, the Naples Restaurant Week pitch deck was formed.
1st year it started off with 20-ish restaurants, spanned over 11 days, mostly in the downtown area. It was what I called the "Fall Edition". It was during that sweet spot right after Thanksgiving when people were stuffed from eating and right before Christmas when people were saving and shopping. This period created a gap that gave Restaurant Week perfect positioning. The upcoming year was the launch of the "Spring Edition". This was the no-brainer time period after snow birds left and hospitality was dead until October.
Towards the end of 2016, I took on a new business partner and the event was renamed Sizzle SWFL Restaurant Week by 2017. Spanning from Marco Island to Cape Coral "and everything tasty in-between" as our radio commercials said, the event grew to almost 40,000 reservations per edition and 75+ participating restaurants.
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In December of 2019, before I knew a global pandemic would shut the world down I decided to walk away from Sizzle, give it to my then business partner, and pursue my dreams to build a hospitality giant. Even in 2020, during the height of Covid, when I could of played it safe and keep the entity together, I knew it was time for the next chapter.
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I'm forever thankful for this one event and all the people that dined and supported over the years. It's opened countless doors and garnished lasting relationships. In a lot of ways it set the foundation for my professional career. I started as a college dropout with $35 in my name, on a patio table inside my living room as a desk. No mentors, no business acumen, no contracts. If ignorance is bliss, then I was the poster child.
Today, our entity donates to the same college I dropped out of, to programs that didn't exist while I was there. Our team is working rigorously towards a bigger mission of solving work force development and enhancing education within the hospitality industry. And through a global pandemic, a collapse in market, and a devastating hurricane, we no longer have a seat at the table, we are the table.
THE CHALLENGE
Increase revenue to restaurants during the slow shoulder months of the year while introducing new audiences and hopefully increasing the quality of food offerings to the SWFL region.
THE WORK
Two bi-annual,14 day events hosted in the Winter and Summer with 75+ restaurants across all of SWFL, a 500+ person ticketed kick-off tasting event called "First Bite", a scholarship fund, and tons of calories.
