The road to SoBe, Pt. 5

Joining the group of Panthers working as student associates during the Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival Feb. 25-28 is hospitality student Michael Vidal. Like a few of his peers, he is keeping us posted on his experiences leading up to “SoBe.”

Week of Feb. 8, 2010

Michael Vidal will assign student associates to work with a constellation of star chefs during this year's "SoBe."

It’s a pretty cool opportunity to be working on SoBe. As the lead student associate coordinator for the Burger Bash and the Best of the Best I am responsible for verifying that our student associates are appropriately paired with the 22 chefs participating in the first event and the 46 participating in the second.

I am very excited to have the opportunity to work with celebrated chefs such as Marcus Samuelsson, Laurent Tourondel, Scott Conant, Michael Chiarello, Michael Symon, Lidia Bastianich, Rocco DiSpirito, David Burke, Michael Schwartz, Spike Mendelssohn, Masaharu Morimoto and Michael Lomonaco, among others.

Before the student assignments are made, I balance the needs of each chef with the students I’ll be working with. First thing I do is assess all my students from a culinary experience perspective, and determine whether a more qualified student is needed or a less qualified one. This task takes more organization that I could ever have imagined.

In early January, when I started this process of preparing the assignments and placing the students, things were so very hectic. As time has gone by, though, things have fallen into place and everything’s now pretty steady.

As you read this, I am assigning students to their positions. About three or four positions are still open, so I’m trying to fill those up.

Working on the festival, I have come to realize that if something bad happens, we’ll just deal with it, right there on the spot. For example, last year our team didn’t provide water bottles to the students assigned to work at the chefs’ stations and everyone got very thirsty. We did what we could do. This year, though, we know to make sure that all of the students working at chef stations have water bottles.

While working as the student associate coordinator does take up a huge chunk of time, for me this experience is about more than just the festival. It’s about everything we’ve done from the past few months until the festival and how it will all come together.

We’re planning for the worst and hoping for the best. I hope all continues going well.

To read more blog entries from Panthers working on the 2010 South Beach Wine & Food Festival, click here.