Food and Wine Festival goes global to China


Ten years ago, the Food Network’s South Beach Wine & Food Festival (SoBe) was the “Florida Extravaganza,” a modest gathering on FIU’s Biscayne Bay Campus to showcase food and drink. Fast forward to 2010. FIU just replicated what is now the biggest and best known food and wine festival, but in China, thanks to the experience and dedication of the leadership and faculty of the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, and the FIU partnership with Tianjin University of Commerce (TUC), where FIU’s China campus is located.

The inaugural China Wine & Food Festival, in collaboration with students from TUC, welcomed more than 1,500 visitors Sept. 18 to the historic Italian District of Tianjin. And while “compared to SoBe now, that’s small,” Susan Gladstone noted, “SoBe also started out very small.” Gladstone, who is an adjunct professor of events management at BBC, took about a year to put the event together.

Aerial view of festival site

“The idea was that it would be wonderful for the students in China to have that same experience of participating in a large-scale event and spirit of all coming together for a common goal to promote and benefit their school,” said Gladstone.

Set around the perimeter of the Italian piazza, the festival had 20 food booths serving a diversity of international fare from high-end restaurants and hotels, as well as booths representing 50 wineries providing wine seminars, a fairly new concept for China. Celebrity chefs, including New Orleans native and Beijing’s No. 1 young chef Max Levy of Bei restaurant and No. 1 roast duck chef in Beijing, Da Dong, served up their signature techniques and dishes. An Italian chef demonstrated how to make fresh pasta, and embassies from Romania, Slovenia and Spain also had booths.“We also had our own FIU booth where our students made Texas-style Chili, which appeared to be a crowd favorite.”

Mango demonstration by Chef Instructor Judith Williams

In addition to overcoming the logistics of setting up an event almost 8,000 miles away, Gladstone and her team, including former FIU students Alex Kuk and Andrew Kaplan, and current student Matthew Moran, were successful at securing extensive sponsorships from international firms such as Marriot, Westin, Renaissance, Intercontinental Group, Raffles, Royal Caribbean and more. And between television, internet and radio, the festival had 83 million media impressions.

Gladstone is already preparing for next year’s event. The goal is to double participation and expand the event to two days over two venues to showcase the city. “I would love to more than double attendance and double the scope!”

— Aimee Dingwell