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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Opening Night: How to Host the Perfect Restaurant Grand-Opening

Opening Night: How to Host the Perfect Restaurant Grand-Opening

If you are someone that has been planning the opening of your restaurant for some time, you may be overwhelmed. Opening up a restaurant takes a lot of intense planning and sometimes it is easy to forget that in order to truly introduce your restaurant to the world, you need to host a grand opening.

Though you may feel confident when it comes to operating your restaurant, hosting a grand opening event is a brand new ordeal altogether. Hosting a successful restaurant grand opening requires intense planning, so there is no wonder why the prospect of doing so is so intimidating.

If you have found yourself in a situation where you have an upcoming grand opening and you are not quite sure whether or not you are properly prepared, here is our advice on how to host the perfect restaurant grand opening.

Make sure that you have guests

A very common mistake that people make when hosting their first restaurant grand opening is not inviting guests. People tend to think that they can advertise the grand opening and people will just come, but that really isn’t the case. If you don’t have an established business, then it is likely that you will not have a large following and so the likelihood of getting a good turnout from a general advertisement is very slim.

The best way to ensure that your restaurant’s grand opening has a lot of guests is by personally inviting people. If you really want to bring some attention to your opening, you could even invite some local celebrities or the mayor of your town. However, if you don’t have the desire to have celebrities at your event, then you could invite friends or local business owners.

Inviting local business owners means that you can get to know the competition and even make some friends, as you never know when you may need to borrow something or ask for a favor.

Get some publicity

What is the point in having a grand opening if it is not going to get any attention? We recommend that you contact your local newspaper or even buy exclusive leads on local bloggers that can document your grand opening.  Having some publicity will make people want to visit your restaurant once it is officially open.  If you get the right publicity, you can also let people know what you may be selling and what atmosphere you have to offer. This is something that people are not usually aware of until they actually get to your restaurant, so being able to inform them of this information beforehand will only benefit your business.

Make sure that your staff are properly trained

Your restaurant grand opening is the first chance that you get to make a real impression on potential customers. For this reason, it is essential to make sure that your staff is properly trained before your opening event.

We recommend that you employ staff that has at least two years of restaurant experience, this way you will not have to worry too much about them making mistakes and you can instead focus on ensuring that the rest of your opening goes to plan. If you are someone that is new to the restaurant world, then having workers with a lot of experience will also make sure that you feel comfortable.

Offer an opening event deal

If you are worried about your opening event not having enough attention, then we recommend that you offer a one-time deal. Offering a great opening deal will make people much more likely to come and try out your food. Though you will not be making as much money, this will really give you the chance to get your brand out there and even pick up customers that will keep coming back if they like what you have to offer.

When offering a grand opening deal, be sure to check that you are not underselling yourself as you still need to make some sort of profit in order to be successful. Be sure to work out all of your finances before you advertise the deal, just to ensure that you are not losing money.

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.

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.