Editorial
Front Page - Friday, November 26, 2010
Events with Taste, a collection of chefs focused on food
Erica Tuggle
Michelle Wells owns and operates Loose Cannon Studio, an event hall that features Terry Cannon’s gallery of whimsical art in bright pastel colors. Wells is also the owner and founder of Events with Taste, a catering company that specializes in making their dishes from scratch. The Loose Cannon Gallery will be the event hall during the Champagne & Chocolates event to honor the judiciary on Dec. 16. Event with Taste will be catering the event.
- Erica Tuggle
Assuming that all caterers prepare from scratch the hors d’oeuvres and the special event foods you pay top dollar for might leave you unpleasantly surprised. Although it makes sense that caterers would make their own food, Michelle Wells, of the catering business Events with Taste says this is becoming a rarity in the business.
Fortunately, Wells’ cooks prepare all their food from square one, and she has one of the largest kitchen staffs in the city to do so. Here’s more good news. Wells is providing the catering for the Chattanooga Bar Association event “Champagne & Chocolates,” an afternoon to honor the judiciary on Dec. 16 at Loose Cannon Studio.
Wells established Events with Taste 10 years ago, after moving back to Chattanooga from Northern California, where she was the director of operations for a catering company. She has been a restaurant chef for most of her adult life, but has always planned to start a catering business because of the variety it affords her to cook different things on a day-to-day basis.
To get the ball rolling on her catering business in Chattanooga, she opened a little restaurant called “The Cupboard” to cater out of and establish her name. Once her reputation was built and the catering was doing enough volume, she shut down the restaurant and went full-time into catering.
Events with Taste offers not only catering, but full-scale event planning as well, depending on how little or how much a customer wants their help. Either way, they can cover the spectrum for whatever is needed for an event. They cater any private home, have worked at the Hunter Museum, the Tennessee Aquarium, Bessie Smith Hall and are on pretty much everyone’s catering list, Wells says. They have even been one of the few people who the Trade Center has allowed to come in and help with catering events they can’t do on their own.
Events with Taste menus are 100 percent custom. They schedule a food interview with every client, create a menu based off that and the client comes back to tweak it here and there.
She says, “We really don’t have any type of lists for them to choose from because we don’t really want to. We want it to be custom.”
They do offer an horde’ ours list that changes about every three months with the seasons, but other than that, Wells says, “it’s all in my head.”
For the Champagne and Chocolates event, the menu will be dessert driven and feature chocolate items with different textures including chocolate mousses, chocolate truffles and other different kinds of chocolates.
The Chattanooga Bar Assoc-iation was Wells’ first client
when she moved to Chatta-nooga, and she says she enjoys clients like Lynda Hood, who has specific ideas about the colors, the feel of the event and the size of the guest list, so that all Wells has to do is put it all together.
The Loose Cannon Studio, where the event will be held, has recently been taken over by Wells, and she independently operates the space. They built a 1,200 square foot commercial kitchen in the back and have now moved their whole catering operation into the Loose Cannon space.
Wells says the space is nice to have since they have been operating out of the Hunter for almost four years and did most of their events there, but it wasn’t theirs to make changes to.
“If someone comes to us and want us to do their catering but doesn’t have anywhere to go, now we have something to offer them as a place to go. It works out well because we can offer a lot of discounts that a lot of other event facilities can’t because we provide the whole package. It’s a nice opportunity for people because they can get everything in one place,” she says.
Wells says she likes that Loose Cannon can be a blank slate because of the colors within that makes it easy for anyone to bring any color in there they want. Also, the modern industrial feel and wide open space that the building has makes it ideal for a variety of events ranging from a modern birthday dance party on one end to bringing in pretty linen to give it a bridal feel.
She says when the building first opened, she had a bunch of kitchen equipment in storage and didn’t know what to do about a catering kitchen so it was loaned to building owner Terry Cannon, and ever since Loose Cannon first opened, there has always been a little piece of Events with Taste within it.
Wells says the fact that Events with Taste is so food driven is important to them.
“We will play with the lighting and have a great staff and like for things to look pretty, but at the end of the day, it’s about food, and we enjoy cooking. We do cook everything,” she says. “In the environment now where the food industry as a whole is trying to make everything easy on everyone, and you can buy things pre-packaged, a lot of people go in that direction and get the pre-packaged things and microwave it, and we utilize very little of that, if any at all.”
Wells says they buy from as many local farmers as possible, buy organic, grass fed and from sustainable farms, too.
“The food costs a little bit more, and I probably have the largest kitchen staff of any other caterer because there is a whole lot that goes into taking the food from farm to table. You may pay a little more for the pre-packed food, but you don’t have the labor costs we do because all you have to do is shake it out and put it in the oven. We are proud of the fact that we cook still,” she says.
For more information on Events with Taste visit www.ewtcaters.com.
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