Who: Forty chefs flown in from fifteen cities across four continents, six hundred guests in cocktail attire, and Sinai Health Foundation as the beneficiary.
What: FoodBall, a one-night, stations-style culinary gala pairing top chefs with top wineries and, over at our corner of the room, a little Spanish beer that punched well above its weight.
When: Friday, October 4th, 2019.
Where: The Liberty Grand Entertainment Complex, Exhibition Place, Toronto.
Why: To fund upgrades to patient food services at Mount Sinai Hospital, and, as it turns out, to prove that Toronto could host a culinary event on par with anything I'd seen in New York or Barcelona.
I have organized a lot of sponsorship activations. Hundreds, at this point, across nearly two decades between brand activation work at Labatt, luxury spirits at Diageo, and now my own shop. So when I tell you FoodBall was one of the most tightly run, best-produced events I've stood inside of, I'm not saying it as someone dazzled by canapés and candlelight. I'm saying it as someone who reads a floor plan for a living and knows exactly how many things can go wrong between a chef's flight landing and their dish hitting a guest's hand at the right temperature. Nothing went wrong. Not once, not that I saw, and I was watching all night.
I was there wearing two hats. One was simply as a guest, because Toronto's food and hospitality world is small enough that you know everyone in the room by their second glass of wine. The other was as the person who had spent the better part of the summer getting Estrella Damm into the building as a beverage sponsor. If you don't know the brand, it's the beer that came out of Barcelona in 1876 and now shows up everywhere from Camp Nou to the kind of dinner parties where somebody's inevitably cracked open a bottle of Inedit, the El Bulli collaboration brew. Landing a Spanish import into a room built around Michelin pedigree and Amalfi Coast lobster zeppole wasn't a hard sell, exactly, but it required the kind of activation planning that doesn't show up on the guest-facing side of the night. Getting a product to feel native to a room, rather than bolted onto it, is the whole job. I'll leave it there and let the room speak for itself.
And what a room. FoodBall was co-founded by Nick Di Donato of Liberty Entertainment Group and Alan Fogel, and the ambition from the outset was to put chefs from fifteen major cities shoulder to shoulder under one roof, something Di Donato had pointed out in the lead-up press wasn't something Toronto sees very often, chefs of that calibre cooking side by side in one location. Standing in the room on the night, I understood exactly what he meant. You don't often get to walk twenty feet and go from Amalfi Coast to Tel Aviv to Copenhagen without a passport.
The chef roster alone would have been worth the ticket price. Alfonso Iaccarino of Don Alfonso 1890 came in from the Amalfi Coast with a lobster zeppole that guests were still talking about at the coat check. Tel Aviv sent Adeena Sussman, the cookbook author behind Chrissy Teigen's Cravings, along with Barak Aharoni of Alena and Raz Sela of Turkiz. Copenhagen's Beau Clugston, a Noma alum who trained directly under René Redzepi, plated a breaded oyster with lovage that I'm still thinking about. New York sent Amanda Cohen of Dirt Candy, a James Beard-nominated, Michelin Guide-recognized chef who also happens to be Canadian, which felt like a nice bit of symmetry for the night.
The Michelin thread ran deep through the whole roster, and it wasn't incidental, it was clearly part of the curation. Scott Saunderson, now leading BlueBlood Steakhouse at Casa Loma, previously ran the kitchen at Manley, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Sussex. Mitch Bates of Momofuku spent three years as Chef de Cuisine at Ko, a two-Michelin-star New York institution. Sal Lamboglia brought Bar Primi down from New York, a Michelin Bib Gourmand pasta spot. Romain Avril, who trained in one and two-Michelin-starred kitchens in France and at The Greenhouse in Mayfair before landing in Toronto, was there representing Neruda. Angus An of Vancouver's Maenam staged at The Ledbury and The Fat Duck before he ever opened a restaurant of his own. Even the pastry side had a Michelin pedigree, with Nadège Nourian having trained in Michelin-starred kitchens in London before building her Toronto patisserie empire.
Toronto held its own, and then some. Claudio Aprile of Xango, Craig Harding of La Palma and Campagnolo, Carl Heinrich of Richmond Station, Alexandra Feswick of Drake Devonshire, and Jason Bangerter of Langdon Hall, fresh off winning Iron Chef Canada, all had stations going. Antonio Park came in from Montreal with a compressed watermelon nigiri that had a line the entire night, and Afrim Pristine of Cheese Boutique, Canada's only Maitre Fromager, was doing halloumi that guests kept sneaking back for seconds of. Jonathan Gushue flew in from Fogo Island Inn with his lettuce fondue, and Jeremy Charles brought East Coast scallop and sea urchin all the way from St. John's.
It was, by any honest measure I can offer as someone who's stood inside a lot of activations, a world-class production. The room never felt crowded despite the density of the roster, the wine program pulled from top producers in Italy and California, and the whole thing had the polish of an event built to become an annual fixture rather than a one-off. As NOW Magazine put it heading into the fall, this was a star-studded lineup unlike anything the city's food calendar had seen, and I'd agree with that assessment even having seen the room from the inside.
The number that matters most, though, is the one that came after the plates were cleared. FoodBall's sold-out inaugural night raised over $800,000 for Sinai Health Foundation, funding that goes directly toward upgrading food services for patients at Mount Sinai. Six hundred tickets, forty chefs, one night, and eight hundred thousand dollars toward better food for people who need it most while they're in hospital. That's the kind of return on a room full of good intentions that makes every hour of activation planning worth it.
I've done this work long enough to know when a sponsorship placement is just logo soup on a step-and-repeat, and when it's actually part of something worth being proud of. FoodBall was the latter. Here's hoping the city gets another one.