With John Sergi, Chef Design Officer of Centerplate's New Strategic Hospitality Design Shop

"If you give your guests or fans honest value and fun, the revenue streams will reward you well."

How did you become focused on event and big venue hospitality?
My interest in hospitality started at a very early age. I credit my grandmother with teaching me the basics as a little boy so that by the time I was eleven I was working in a family friend's catering company.

I got my introduction to event hospitality when a friend of mine who was running the Lipton Tennis Tournament (now known as the Sony Ericsson Open) asked me to take a look at the event's food service. At the time I was working as a tennis pro in Colorado and managing a four-unit restaurant company. I realized that these tournaments and events were missing a major strategic opportunity with their food, and it got me started as a consultant helping clients create hospitality solutions informed by their brand and location.

The next fall I enrolled in the Masters Program at Cornell University to develop the template and the business plan for my idea. I immersed myself in all aspects of food and hospitality: catering, running kitchens, restaurant front-of-house operations, etc. My education and experiential learning further crystallized my philosophy and practice of strategic hospitality, which I've expanded to resorts, conventions, restaurants, and other big venue entertainment segments.

You say you defined your philosophy for event food service while at Cornell—how would you describe that philosophy?
My goal is to create entertainment experiences that transcend the actual events. If the hospitality and foodservice can be designed to align with the event's brand mission and objectives, not only does it help build business, but it also helps build the host property's connections with guests.

It's all about perspective—strategic perspective. Traditionally in our industry, food service operations are set up for the sole purpose of selling food. However, if you ask those operations to do more for you, you stand to make a lot more.

Food has the capacity to affect a variety of streams in the sports and convention industries, one of which is revenue. If you look at food and hospitality as informed by the brand objectives of the setting, the event, the team, and the facility you end up a lot better off in the long run. Food is a powerful tool for making people happy. It can (and should) be used to engage people, to get their attention. If you give your guests or fans honest value and fun, the revenue streams will reward you well.

Your resume includes consulting on some pretty high-profile concepts. How did you come to take on the role of Chief Design Officer for Centerplate?
It's true I've had great fun with terrific projects across the world—like Citi Field and the US Open in New York, Wembley Stadium in London, Turk Telecom Stadium in Istanbul—making these properties more engaging places for people to go. But as an independent hospitality strategist, I wasn't in a position to change things on scale and to get an entire industry to move and to look at things differently. That's what this opportunity with Centerplate is about: executing this change on scale with more resources and tools than I ever dreamed of having. When I met Centerplate's CEO, Des Hague, we just came together on the same page and he was willing to take the steps necessary to affect this type of change.

For the last twenty years my mission has remained unchanged. I've always stayed true to getting people to look at hospitality in big venue settings in a different way. As Chief Design Officer I do have a role in designing concepts and facilities. However, my focus is on design in the broader context of reinvention. Effectively we are taking Centerplate, the largest player in sports, entertainment, and convention hospitality, and turning this big ship to support and align with the brand personalities of our clients. This reinvention takes being "in the hospitality business" to a whole new level. We are out to help our clients truly understand what is most engaging for their guests.

Why "Centerplate Stir™?"
These times are complex and so is our business. Complex solutions require multiple points of view. Centerplate Stir™ is a design initiative developed as a way to get Centerplate, a very big company with an 80-year history, to add a new dimension to its scope and to function as a design thinking shop. Centerplate Stir™ allows Centerplate to proactively create the future while working on present solutions and concepts. It gives a space for us to be able to bring in a team of talented people from within as well as outside of our industry to develop new and better ways of envisioning solutions for our clients. From price demand elasticity for premium seating products to brand analysis for creating identities facility-wide, Centerplate Stir™ is a place where that thinking can happen.

What's in it for me the client?
Centerplate Stir™ means that we are really sharpening our focus on all of our clients and their customers. That's what being number one in hospitality means. Our approach is from a customer-first perspective. We are currently developing ideas that will have applications throughout our systems. These concepts are fun and our clients will want to get involved. Ultimately, we expect our clients to see increased engagement and revenues through cutting-edge hospitality strategies.

Can you walk us through a recent Stir project?
This year's Belmont stakes was the first Centerplate event where we activated the Stir™ design-thinking approach. Our goal was to reinvent the premium hospitality program by taking a strategic perspective that answered the question, "if the Belmont Stakes were translated into food, what would that food be?"

The Belmont Stakes is a unique event and required a hospitality solution solely informed by its location and history. We took a hard look at what the Belmont was about: a very New York event with a lot of tradition. The context called for familiar food, nothing trendy, but rather honest and authentic, with a deep history. We examined the neighborhood around the park and the people who live there. As luck would have it, two up-and-coming chefs, Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo, chef proprietors of Frankies 457 in Brooklyn and Frankies 17 in Manhattan, who grew up literally around the corner from the Park, were eager to take part in reinventing the event. We wanted to engage people in a setting where they weren't used to paying attention to the food, and the Franks were completely on board. Working as a team with the Franks and the Centerplate staff at the Park, we developed an amazing menu featuring favorite recipes from the Franks' restaurants and tied to their new book, The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion and Cooking Manual. The race-day fans loved it! We connected with them and gave them food that they understood and that was in context. Our approach was completely about the place and the people in that place, and the reception was overwhelmingly positive.