Creating Memorable Experiences for Our Clients at Babelfís

Over recent months, immersive food tasting events have been taking the world by storm. It’s an opportunity for restaurants, bars and cafes to showcase everything their menu and their staff working behind the scenes has to offer, as well as collaborate with some amazing brands. We’ve been lucky to work with a number of different brands on behalf of our hospitality client, Gallaghers, a family-run bar & restaurant located in the heart of Cork City on MacCurtain Street. We wanted to recap how the past couple of events have gone down.

For a little bit of context, if you didn’t know already, we’ve been working closely with Gallaghers for almost two years, beginning with their rebrand, to designing an award-winning pub front, as well as a unique Roe & Co. bar installation. After their rebrand, they trusted us to fully takeover their marketing, of which we’ve been running for well over a year now. We’re constantly looking for ways to innovative and disrupt a market that’s pretty saturated in Cork. Unique events has been a huge part of that strategy.

The best part is, is that the team at Gallaghers are always open to new ideas when it comes to their restaurant offering. We knew this would be the perfect opportunity to partner with Diageo’s premium whiskey brand Roe & Co. to bring an immersive tasting experience to Cork City. They had the beautiful bar set up, they had the skills to develop an incredible menu, we knew all we needed was to bring the people.

We wanted to create a multi-sensory experience throughout two sittings for attendees of Gallaghers X Roe & Co. Over the course of three hours, two-sittings of 30 people enjoyed a four course taster menu, guided by World-Class Finalist Cal Byrne. Before the event, a lot of work and collaboration went down to ensure the food menu was appropriately integrated with the cocktail menu created by the team at Gallaghers. The bar team at Gallaghers, made up of expert mixologists, worked closely with Cal to ensure the night was would as smoothly as possible, from pre-event prep right down to timings on the night. Once a stellar menu line up was created, learnings about the Roe & Co. brand were taken into consideration, both sittings sold out, we were ready to kick off the evening.

Guests began the experience with a photo opportunity against a backdrop we pulled together at our production facilities Babelfís Print. A key element to the success of this event was our ability to provide every service needed for a cohesive event, from menu printing to content creation to event co-ordination on the night. As a full-service creative agency with an operating production facility, we were able to ensure the success of this event taking into consideration even the smallest of details.

Cal took our attendees through the flavour profile of each food & drink pairing on the menu, where they then noted on tasting cards what they rated the combination out of five, as well as tasting notes on each dish. It gave our attendees an opportunity to interact with the host rather than just sitting and consuming the food & cocktails.

We sent each attendee on their merry way after their two hour sitting with full stomachs, happy smiles, and an incredible Roe & Co. goodie bag to remember the night with. Great success.

We knew that the team in Gallaghers were more than capable of hosting a knock-out party, so the next natural step was celebrating their name sake, Rory Gallagher’s 75th birthday. Our in-house creative team created ’75’, which was an all day celebration of the music legend, from a uniquely created food & cocktail menu, to a pop up photo display of world-famous photographer Govert de Roos who captured key moments of Rory’s life down through the years. We had performances from Rory tribute band ‘The Shin Kickers’, speeches from Rory’s immediate family, and of course delicious cocktails flowing all night long. The night was a knock-out success, with Rory fans travelling from far & wide to pack out Gallaghers to celebrate Rory’s life.

Roll forward a few months and Cork on a Fork comes to Cork City. The team at Gallaghers were ready to do it all again with a sold out tasting menu event. But before we could create a bespoke menu this time, the bar staff at Gallaghers were invited down to Beara Distillery just past Castledownbere to learn more about the family-run business. The lads got the chance to find out more about the history of the gin & whiskey brand, took part in a distillery tour & product sampling (strictly for research purposes.)

With all of these learnings, they were able to take their knowledge back to MacCurtain street to devise the ultimate brunch menu paired perfectly with gin & whiskey cocktails created using Beara. With music from the lovely Fiona Dineen, guests spent the afternoon learning about Beara Distillery, as well as all the work that went into bringing Beara Brunch to life. Another knock out success, if we do say so ourselves….

And we’re not done yet. We’re looking forward to creating some more memorable and unique experiences to feed (pardon the pun) into Gallagher’s marketing strategy, and achieve strategic objectives set out for the MacCurtain Street restaurant. Watch this space!

If you think your business could benefit from exciting and bespoke events, we’d love to hear from you! We’re always looking to get our creative juices flowing when it comes to delivering high-quality events – get in touch to find out how we can work together – [email protected].