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Bay Area provides ultimate foodie Super Bowl

Michael Mina Restaurant in San Francisco will feature an ultra-exclusive, $10,000 apiece, six-course feast for the Culinary Kickoff benefit. Mina will be joined by other high-profile chefs.
Photos by: MICHAEL MINA RESTAURANT (4)
Around the time that the final NFL conference championship game ends, the work begins at Hoboken’s Carlo’s Bake Shop.

Just as coaches of the rival Super Bowl teams begin their game planning for the Super Bowl, so are the designers and bakers at Carlo’s, a bakery that’s been the focus of TLC’s “Cake Boss” reality show since 2009.

Owner Buddy Valastro will be designing a cake bigger than a life-sized linebacker for the annual Taste of the NFL benefit in the Super Bowl host city. It’s a cake

that will take more than 20 people to finish, and when the creation is complete, the Cake Boss won’t even trust FedEx to deliver it. Instead, two of his own employees will drive the cake from Hoboken to San Francisco — a 43-hour journey.

That’s just one indication of how important food has become at the Super Bowl.

Expect wine and food pairings to be debated as intensely during

Super Bowl week as quarterback/receiver combinations. And with the NFL championship in the San Francisco area for the first time since 1985, this will be the ultimate foodie Super Bowl.

Every big event this week has food and wine at the center. One in particular will be a much tougher ticket than the Super Bowl. Three days before the NFL championship, 80 gourmets will pay $10,000 apiece for the Culinary Kickoff benefit, a six-course feast at the Michael Mina Restaurant in San Francisco, prepared by Mina and fellow high-profile chefs Charlie Palmer, Todd English and David Burke.

Celebrity chefs are commanding the same five-figure appearance fees as star NFL athletes; this Super Bowl week, food and wine

will be as important as passing and punting.

“There’s a lot of parties during Super Bowl week and there will be food at all of these parties, but we wanted one that was the serious food and wine event,” said Palmer, whose string of 17 restaurants includes the splashy Aureole in Manhattan.

The Delisle Group is staging Culinary Kickoff.

“You start with the hospitality demands a Super Bowl creates and multiply that times the level of ‘foodiness’ here in San Francisco and demand that’s like nothing I have seem,” said Chrissy Delisle, who’s working her 20th NFL championship. Her group hopes to raise $50,000 in scholarship aid for the Culinary Institute of America’s scholarship fund.

Mina is teaming with the NFL during Super Bowl week to convert his RN74 wine-centric restaurant on Mission Street into On the Fifty, a football-themed eatery. Bourbon Steak and Bourbon Pub, Mina’s members-only establishments at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, will be hosting “tailgates” on Super Bowl Sunday, but cooking will be under the direction of Michelin three-star chefs.

“We’ve already done things for game days like roast a whole saddle of Wagyu beef, so we’ll have to top that,” said Mina, who directs a collection of 26 restaurants across the country and eight around San Francisco. “Food has become an intricate part of any big celebration, and the Super Bowl is America’s biggest celebration. What’s going to make this one so special is just the restaurants here and the access we have to everything that’s important to a restaurant, whether it’s local seafood, beef, California produce or the wine culture out here.”

Taste of the NFL, the granddaddy of Super Bowl epicurean events, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The Super Bowl-eve strolling food and wine festival has raised more than $24 million for food banks over the years. This year’s “Party with A Purpose” will be hosted by James Beard award-winning chef Andrew Zimmern and will serve 45,000 tastings to 2,500 guests. Tickets are $700.

“New York sells itself as the nation’s culinary center, but San Francisco’s really the best place for foodies,” said Minneapolis restaurateur and Taste of the NFL founder Wayne Kostroski. “You’ve got this mutual admiration society. Football players get all giddy about working with name chefs and vice versa.”

Super Bowl Host Committee Chairman Keith Bruce highlighted his organization’s sponsorships from both Napa Valley and Sonoma County, which is staging a downtown “wine pavilion.”

Bottles of "Super Bowl Fiftieth Reserve," a Bordeaux meritage, sell for $100 a bottle.
Photo by: WINE BY DESIGN
“Food and wine are a big part of who and what we are out here, so we are going to be putting that in front of everything we’re doing,” Bruce said. “Chefs have definitely become part of the entertainment value of Super Bowl week and this is a big opportunity for us to celebrate our rock-star chefs.”

Culinary Kickoff will include wines produced by the likes of Charles Woodson, Dan Marino and Dick Vermeil. And for the “foodiest” Super Bowl, the NFL is licensing a Super Bowl-labeled wine for the first time. Licensed wine expert Wine By Design and Napa’s Freemark Abbey vineyard are producing “Super Bowl Fiftieth Reserve,” a $100 Bordeaux meritage.

“You’ve got athletes like Joe Montana investing in wineries and restaurants and collecting wine,” said Diane Karle, Wine by Design founder and CEO. “So we’ve seen this coming for a while.”

Chef Marc Forgione will do an appearance at the Union Square Macy’s to support his marketing deal with the store and is supervising a game-day tailgate menu for On Location Experiences as part of the experiential hospitality agency’s top-shelf “Inner Circle” offering.

“Anyone doing Super Bowl hospitality now is using food as a differentiator,” said Lonny Sweet, whose Connect Group represents Forgione and other chefs. “People going to [Super Bowl week] choose one event over another based on the chef’s name and reputation.”


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