Why The Best Festival Venue Is a City

Hi Friends,

In today’s newsletter I want to share another thought which has very little to do with cocktails, celebrity bartenders or Michelin-starred dinners. Instead, it had everything to do with how the event itself had been designed.

At Tales, New Orleans itself had quietly become the venue. Restaurants, hotels, historic bars, courtyards and rooftops aren’t supporting the event, they are the event.

At first that might sound obvious. Tales has always been intertwined with New Orleans. But I increasingly think this operating model represents one of the most interesting developments in live experiences. More importantly, I suspect it offers lessons that extend well beyond F&B festivals.

Stop Building Infrastructure You Already Have

The live events industry has become remarkably good at building temporary cities.

We construct kitchens that will only exist for a weekend. We erect bars that disappear after three days. We install temporary hospitality lounges, VIP areas, back-of-house facilities, production offices and catering compounds before tearing everything down almost immediately afterwards. It is simply how festivals have been designed for decades.

There are obvious reasons for this. Most events take place on greenfield sites, fairgrounds or inside convention centers where very little permanent infrastructure exists. Producers therefore have little choice but to build their own.

Cities, however, already possess much of that infrastructure.

New Orleans has hundreds of restaurants. It has world-class cocktail bars, historic hotels, beautiful courtyards and neighborhoods that people actively want to explore. Rather than recreating those assets inside a fenced festival footprint, Tales simply connects them through programming.

That may sound like a subtle difference, but operationally it changes almost everything.

Instead of spending millions recreating a city, the event leverages one that has been evolving for more than three centuries.

Seasonality Isn’t Always a Weakness

One aspect of Tales struck me as particularly interesting.

The event takes place in July, traditionally one of New Orleans’ quieter tourism periods. Most people instinctively see that as a disadvantage. Lower demand, fewer visitors and challenging weather don’t immediately sound like the ingredients for a world-class event.

Yet those same conditions create something incredibly valuable: capacity.

Restaurants have availability. Hotels have rooms. Venues have flexibility. Some of the city’s best kitchens suddenly have the opportunity to host collaborations that would be almost impossible during peak tourism season.

That capacity has allowed Tales to organically evolve into a citywide platform featuring more than 400 events rather than a convention with a handful of evening functions.

I also think it changes the conversation with talent.

One of the hardest parts of producing any culinary event is convincing exceptional chefs to leave their own restaurants for several days. The environment you’re asking them to work in matters enormously. Cooking inside a temporary field kitchen behind a convention center is fundamentally different from collaborating inside Commander’s Palace, Emeril’s, Restaurant R’evolution or one of New Orleans’ other exceptional kitchens.

The venue stops being a logistical necessity and becomes part of the creative proposition itself.

As that proposition improves, attracting world-class talent becomes easier. Better talent creates stronger programming. Stronger programming gives people another reason to travel.

What initially looked like an operational limitation quietly becomes a competitive advantage.

The Venue Shapes the Experience

We often talk about talent as though it alone defines the guest experience.

I don’t think that’s quite right. The stage matters.

A pianist doesn’t perform the same way in Carnegie Hall as they do in a hotel ballroom. Likewise, chefs care deeply about kitchens, equipment, ingredients and workflow because those variables directly influence what ends up on the plate. Bartenders care about bars for exactly the same reason. Their environment isn’t simply where the performance happens; it’s part of the performance itself. And the performance matters to the guest experience as we will explore in my next drop.

That is one of the subtle advantages of using a city instead of replacing it.

The event inherits decades of investment that no producer could realistically recreate. Technology companies often talk about standing on the shoulders of giants. In many ways, Tales does the same thing.

Discovery Is Designed Into the City

One thing I noticed throughout last week was how rarely people followed their original schedule.

A seminar would run long. Someone would recommend a nearby bar. Dinner would turn into another event a few blocks away. Conversations continued while walking between venues and often resulted in entirely new plans for the evening.

I don’t think that’s accidental. Cities naturally create serendipity in ways convention centers struggle to replicate. The walk between experiences becomes an experience itself. Visitors discover restaurants they hadn’t booked, bars they hadn’t heard of and neighborhoods they otherwise might never have explored.

Those unplanned moments are surprisingly valuable because they’re the stories people tell after they get home. Ironically, they rarely appear on the official program.

What Producers Should Learn

Last week’s newsletter argued that consumers increasingly travel for culture rather than attractions. If that’s true, producers face an interesting challenge.

For decades we’ve optimized around footprint, attendance, exhibition space and production efficiency. Those things still matter, but they’re becoming less important than the quality of the ecosystem surrounding the event. Consumers increasingly remember the conversations, collaborations, neighborhoods and moments of discovery that happen between programmed sessions just as much as the sessions themselves.

That requires a different design philosophy.

Rather than asking, “How do we build the perfect venue?”, perhaps we should start asking, “What already exists that we’d never be able to build ourselves?”

The answer may be a city.

Art Basel wouldn’t be Art Basel without Miami. SXSW is inseparable from Austin. Tales belongs to New Orleans.

None of those cities simply host their events. They amplify them.

As producers, I suspect we’ve spent years trying to build better festivals when perhaps we should have been thinking more carefully about how to build better relationships with the places capable of making those festivals extraordinary.

The future of live experiences may not belong to the events with the biggest footprint. It may belong to those that understand how to unlock the extraordinary infrastructure cities have been quietly building for decades.

Cheers to another successful Tales in the books.

BR,

Daniel