EXPERIENCE VIRGINIA'S FINEST

Featuring over 30 culinary inspired events hosted in Williamsburg, Jamestown & Yorktown highlighting VA chefs, farmers, foragers, authors and beverage professonals. Come celebrate community and gathering together, all for a good cause.

Chowder Fest

Chowder Fest

w/ Beer & Live Music @ Jamestown Beach

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Bountiful Brews & Bites

Bountiful Brews & Bites

featuring Eat the Streets 757 Food Trucks

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Sommelier Challenge

Sommelier Challenge

Dinner at Williamsburg Winery

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Oyster Roast

Oyster Roast

at the Yorktown Freight Shed

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Everything You Should Be Aware of When Opening a Restaurant

Everything You Should Be Aware of When Opening a Restaurant

If you think you have a brilliant palette and a real sense of service, then something that you may have considered is purchasing your own restaurant. The last couple of years have taught us all that working for others can sometimes be unreliable.

Thanks to the events of the pandemic, some people were unexpectedly fired with no financial support and no savings to fall back on. Being left in such a vulnerable position can do a lot to someone and for a lot of people, it was the motivation that they needed to finally become their own boss.

If you have a passion for food and fine cuisine, then opening your own restaurant may seem like the natural next step in your life. There is no hiding that running your own restaurant can be tricky and there are a lot of steps of preparation that you have to complete. The restaurant business is also incredibly fragile and it is not hard for a restaurant to close within its first year. If you are depending on your restaurant to make money, then you simply cannot afford for your business to fail.

A surefire way to guarantee that your restaurant is going to fail is by failing to prepare. Here is everything that you should be aware of when opening a restaurant.

Staff Is Key

In other businesses, it is possible to rely on the product that you are selling to do most of the work for your business. However, when you are operating a restaurant, there are lots of factors of it that can influence the success of your business. For example, the service is incredibly important, the appearance of the restaurant is important and so is the food.

This stuff doesn’t just come out of nowhere and you need a dependable set of staff to make your dream into a reality. When you are setting up your own restaurant, it can be easy to become overwhelmed and you can very easily prioritize some tasks over others. This may mean that selecting your staff is not a priority and you are just likely to read resumes and make your choices dependent on those.

However, having the right staff in the restaurant business is very important and if you do not have the right staff then your business can fail. A restaurant needs to run like a well-oiled machine and if some of the parts of this machine aren’t working as well as the others, then your restaurant is only doomed to
fail.

Don’t be afraid to be picked during the hiring process as this will help to secure the success of your business. With the staff that you do hire, make it clear to them that if they are not working well with the team, then they will easily lose their position. This will get rid of any slackers and ensure that everyone is working as well as they can be.

Legally Cover Everything

Owning a restaurant is a big investment and the last thing that you want is for everything to go wrong and for you to lose all of the money that you have invested in your business. First of all, you want to make sure that all of your restaurants is insured. This means that you shouldn’t just insure the building that you are operating from, but you should insure all of the equipment that you have inside your business, as this can be very expensive and you do not want to lose your hard-earned cash.

You should also think about what is going to happen to your business when you are gone. If you have no plan in place, then you have no idea what is going to happen to your business after you are gone and this could lead to it failing. I would recommend getting in touch with some of the will and estate lawyers Australia has to offer and putting a plan in place.

It would be sad that after a full lifetime of work, your business isn’t left in the right hands when you are gone as this could have a negative impact on your legacy and all of the success that you found in your life.

How to Set Up a Fantastic Bed and Breakfast From Your Own Home

How to Set Up a Fantastic Bed and Breakfast From Your Own Home

If you are someone that is great with people and you love to host, then something you may have considered is running your very own bed and breakfast. Some people just have a passion for hosting and find joy in giving someone a satisfying stay.

If you are reaching retirement or you just have some spare cash on your hands, then you may be looking for a fun way that you can invest it. You could always set up a business such as a store or a restaurant, but these are very likely to fail and not be as successful as you would like.

If you want a constant flow of cash, but less risk, then I would recommend setting up a bed and breakfast. A bed and breakfast can actually be a very low-cost business.

If you are someone with a large house and a lot of spare rooms, then you could always set up a bed and breakfast in your own home. Setting up a bed and breakfast is not as simple as just allowing people into your home and there are some expectations that your guests will have. Here is how to set up a fantastic bed and breakfast from your own home.

Clear Out Personal Possessions

It is likely that a lot of the spare rooms in your house are full of personal possessions that you have stored there over the years. Something that your bed and breakfast guests will not enjoy is encountering your personal possessions and you have to stay professional when you are running a bed and breakfast.

Make sure that you get rid of all traces of your personal life and make the room a blank slate. Doing this will ensure that your guests are comfortable and it will also give you a great base to decorate your rooms.

If you are not sure where to put your possessions, you could always keep one of your rooms as a storage room for your personal possessions. This means that you won’t have to get rid of your personal possessions, but they will at least be out of the way.

Get Comfortable Beds

A big part of your guest’s experience at your bed and breakfast is how they sleep. If your guest does not have a good night’s sleep, then they could leave complaints or even a bad review for your bed and breakfast.

A big reason why someone may have a poor night’s sleep is because of the quality of the mattress that they are using. If you do not have a lot of startup money to work with, the idea of having to buy several expensive mattresses may not be exciting to you. A great alternative is purchasing a bamboo mattress. These can be quite cheap and they will last for a number of years and stay firm, which means that they will be useful no matter how many guests you have.

Make Sure You Have Breakfast Down

The other most important feature of a bed and breakfast is breakfast. People literally come to your business for two reasons, to sleep and to eat a delicious breakfast the next day. Before you even consider opening up your bed and breakfast, you should first perfect your breakfast-making ability.

You need to get the timing of your cooking down perfectly, as no guest likes to wait for breakfast and you also need to make sure that you are offering quality ingredients. If you do not consider yourself a chef, you can also hire a professional to make breakfast in the morning.

What to Eat When Studying For an Exam

What to Eat When Studying For an Exam

Exam season is coming up and if you are a student, then you are probably prepping for your upcoming exams. Exam season is exhausting and terrifying, as all that you can think about is what will happen if you are not successful. If you want to be a success, you have to study hard or even see a tutor. If you are looking to be a success, you should definitely employ the best tutoring in New York to secure the success of your exams.

Though tutoring and studying are an obvious part of your success, you may be surprised to learn that what you eat will also have a big influence on how well you can do in your exams. There are certain foods that will improve your ability to retain information and there are also foods that can get in the way of this. Here is what to eat when studying for an exam.

Dark Chocolate

Dark chocolate is a great food item to eat when you are trying to get ready for exam season and it is a nice treat after a hard day of trying to revise. What you may not know is that chocolate actually contains flavonoids, which can be very beneficial to the health of your brain. Dark chocolate is great because it has a very high concentration of flavonoids, which means that the more of it that you eat, the healthier your brain will be.

Eating dark chocolate can also help you fight fatigue, which means that you will be able to spend much more time studying without worrying about getting exhausted and not making the most of your time.

Eggs

Eggs are great to eat because they are rich in protein, which can help to improve the general health of your body. Eggs are packed with nutrients, but you will be shocked to learn that a lot of the nutrients that can be found in eggs have been found to be necessary for brain function. As you probably know, Vitamin B12 is crucial to the health of your brain and eating a lot of foods containing B12 can help with memory retention and general brain function.

Fish

Omega 3s are also fantastic for increasing the health of your brain and helping you to take in information easier. Fish is known to be brain food and fish like tuna, in particular, is great for improving your brain functionality.

How to Make All of Your Friends Laugh at Your Next Meet Up

How to Make All of Your Friends Laugh at Your Next Meet Up

How to Make All of Your Friends Laugh at Your Next Meet Up

Let’s face it, we are living in pretty depressing times. We are just coming out of a global pandemic and we are entering WW3. Utility bills are higher than ever and there is no sign at all that there will be changes to the living wage.

With the world around us so terrible, there is no wonder that depression and anxiety are at an all-time high. If you have talked to your friends lately, you have probably noticed that they are not as chipper as they once were.

If your friends have been spending a lot of time indoors focusing on all of the horrible things in the world, then it is likely that it is time to get them out and about. During times like these, we can all use some human contact and some time to distract ourselves from the reality of just how horrible the world can be.

If you are particularly concerned about your friends, then you should go out of your way to meet up with them and make them smile. If you are not sure how you can lift the mood of your friends, here are some easy ways that you can make them laugh at your next meet-up.

Prepare Some Funny Jokes

Something that a lot of people no longer appreciate is good on-the-nose jokes. People think that comedy has to be clever or subtle these days, but it doesn’t have to at all. Sometimes, all that we need is a bit of cheap comedy to make our days better and it doesn’t need to be well thought out.

Laughing has been scientifically proven to make you feel better and if you want to heighten the moods of your friends, then you should do all that you can to get some cheap laughs. If you have a friend that is a fan of pop culture, then I would recommend that you look up some funny Chuck Norris jokes or jokes about similar pop idols. Though these jokes will not be clever, they are guaranteed to make your friend laugh.

If anything, they will probably laugh more if they are bad and this will put them in a much better mood and this will make the day out that you have together much more fun and enjoyable.

Take Them To a Comedy Club

If you do not consider yourself to be especially funny, why not let people that are professionals when it comes to comedy take care of it all. Now that a lot of live comedy shows are up and running again, something that you can do is go and see some live comedians with your friends.

There is a lot of great comedy shows that you can go and see and a professional comedian is far more likely to make your friends laugh than you are. A very popular trend right now is comedy shows where you can vote on whether or not a comedian is any good.

This means that you can quite literally go and heckle the people that you go and see, which is a lot of fun in itself and is something that you will definitely be able to enjoy as a group.

At these comedy events, you can expect to get cocktails and other alcohol. As you likely know, alcohol makes everything much more exciting and enjoyable, which means that people will likely be in much better moods.

Remember, though you should try your best to make your friends laugh, you should also do everything that you can to speak to them and make sure that they are doing well mentally.