The Food Festival Booker, Catering to Star Chefs 
Alex Quesada for The New York Times
HE DRIVES. HE CODDLES. Lee Schrager inspects a festival site in Miami Beach in February.
By
ALLEN SALKIN
Published: June 11, 2008
ON a morning early this spring, Lee Brian Schrager phoned Kimberly Yorio, a publicist who works with chefs. Ms. Yorio had been trying to figure out how to promote a client’s book, and she used the occasion of the call to ask about the New York City Wine & Food Festival that Mr. Schrager was planning for October.
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South Beach Wine & Food Festival
HE’S THE MAN Lee Schrager with Rachael Ray.
South Beach Wine & Food Festival
Lee Schrager with Martha Stewart.
South Beach Wine & Food Festival
Lee Schrager with Jamie Oliver (center) and Alice Waters.
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Alex Quesada for The New York Times
In October he will bring his Burger Bash to Dumbo.
“Would you consider doing something with
Ferran Adrià?” she recalls saying.
Mr. Schrager laughed. Mr. Adrià is the probably the most celebrated chef in the world. People fly to El Bulli in Spain from the other side of the planet. Who wouldn’t want him?
Ms. Yorio e-mailed Mr. Adrià’s representatives in Europe. The timing seemed right: Mr. Adrià’s latest book, “A Day at El Bulli,” is coming out in the fall.
The next day, she had his answer: “I don’t like festivals. No.”
“Oh no,” she e-mailed back, “this isn’t your normal festival. This is Lee’s festival.”
Magic words. Mr. Adrià had appeared at a festival Mr. Schrager organized in South Beach in 2006. Mr. Schrager had welcomed Mr. Adrià to Miami like a visiting dignitary, making sure he had a good hotel room, giving a dinner in his honor and taking Mr. Adrià and his wife to Joe’s Stone Crab and local Cuban restaurants.
“Great,” came the reply from Mr. Adrià. “Yes.”
No one else does or has ever done what Mr. Schrager does in the food world. As Bill Graham was to booking rock ’n’ roll acts from the 1960s through the 1980s and Swifty Lazar was to closing Hollywood deals during the studio era, Mr. Schrager, 49, is to wrangling celebrity chefs. They know him, they love him, they cross oceans for him.
What Mr. Schrager, who looks a bit like the actor
Paul Sorvino and favors open-necked dress shirts, pressed slacks and loafers, asks from the chefs he has befriended is only that they show up at his festivals. As the charismatic director of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, he has in seven years transformed what was originally a one-day wine tasting event on the campus of Florida International University for a few hundred people into a four-day extravaganza on the sand attracting tens of thousands of visitors, and, this year, a live broadcast on the “Today” show.
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