Restaurants and disaster relief don’t seem all that related, but let’s be honest: Who do you want to rely on in a crisis? Someone who’s good under pressure? Someone who’s creative in the face of fear? Someone who does it all with a smile?
Caroline Rosen thinks what you might just want is a bartender.
A longtime New Orleanian who’s been in the city since before Hurricane Katrina, Rosen has done everything from marketing for bottled water to working as a partner in a design firm to sitting on the board of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. She’s long been passionate about the hospitality industry, and also ran the Made in New Orleans Foundation, where she “focused on minority youth of New Orleans, furthering their education. We worked with the International Culinary Center [and] people like Danny Meyer to make sure they were learning in New York. The whole purpose of that was to then come back to New Orleans and be leaders in the community.”
She’s always been a passionate advocate for hospitality workers—and food—but since she became the executive director of Tales of the Cocktail in 2017, Rosen has redoubled her efforts. The nonprofit’s ”whole mission is to educate, advance, and support those in the hospitality community globally as well as the host cities that have us for our events,” and Rosen has helped lead it to award over $200,000 in grant money to hospitality workers in 2018 alone.
Every year, Tales, which started in 2002 as a walking tour and festival for bartenders, takes over the city of New Orleans for a week of seminars about everything from new ideas and products to how to run a sustainable, equitable business. They’ve also started a series of traveling events, Tales on Tour, which celebrate both hospitality and place. The last one, which I was lucky enough to attend this March, was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, a place that is still recovering from its own devastating hurricane.
According to Rosen, “The Tales that happened after Katrina was really one of those moments when the city came together and felt alive. We had all these different people from around the world coming to support us.” She didn’t go into detail when we spoke, but I got the impression the crisis was a clarifying moment for the organization, which facilitated everything from beach cleanups to group restaurant visits and mental health check-ins while in San Juan.
They’re bringing that commitment back home, and now, it’ll be one they can work on year-round. “The hospitality community is unlike any other in the way that we rally to support each other and the communities that support us… We just embarked on a new space, so we have a brick and mortar [in New Orleans]. It is called Storyteller x Tales. It is a four-story building a block outside the French Quarter, and it’s our offices, it’s where we’ll be doing programming throughout the year, and of course during Tales. We’re opening up a bar on the first floor, and there are going to be exciting things happening.”
Tales 2019 will be from July 16-21, and events from Sazerac tastings to sustainability seminars and sexual harassment workshops are already sold out all these months in advance. I suggest you get your tickets now.
