Previewing Savor St. Pete

Wow, this looks so good. Welcome back to Fox Tampa Bay Live everyone. We are getting a little preview of Savor St. Pete, the food and wine festival returning to Vinoy Park November 7th and 8th, bringing together local restaurants, celebrity chefs, and plenty of bites and sips along the waterfront. So we, like we teased a little bit before this break, are not only welcoming on chef Clayton Perez, executive chef at Hue Parlor and Chop House at the Fenway Hotel in Dunedin, but he is actually joining us from our kitchen over in our other studio where Dinner Diaz is filmed. Chef, thank you so much for joining us. Can you hear me all right? I can hear you. How are you? Yay, yay. The test worked. It worked, everyone. Chef, so glad to welcome you on. Talk to me about Savor St. Pete and what you got going on today. We're getting a little demo here. I'm going to let you take it away. I do. So this is our boutique dinners tomorrow night. We have a very fun, interactive eight-course dinner we're going to do with our sold-out show. What I have in front of us is we had our nice, pretty little moon dancers come in from Maine. We are making a snow cone. So I have a yellow aguachile. There's a lot of different yellow colors. So we didn't really go with just a food style. We went with a color platform, so we have tomatoes, we have carrots, we added some cucumber to help soften it up, some aji amarillo chilies, this awesome little packed ice flavor that will go on top of our oysters, and then we'll serve that on top of a cocktail that our mixologists are pairing. Oh my goodness, you know, you got me at oysters, I'm a huge oyster fan, and then you, did I see that you grew up in southern Louisiana, Chef? Do you feel like those Cajun and Creole influences are seen and tasted a lot in your cooking? Always. That's raised by grandparents, you know, the elders of our community. So it's a huge agriculture state. So when I moved to Florida, it was amazing to see the amount of agriculture. And we've been studying since we've been here. So, wow, that's awesome. And talk to me a little bit about the many hats that you wear over in Pinellas County. I work at probably one of the most wonderful hotels imaginable. It's my magic kingdom. So I run the culinary program for the Fenway Hotel. We oversee all of the food operation on that property. So we do everything from our hue parlor and chop house, which is our upscale, I'd say meat experiment. And then we have high fire rooftop bar. We have parlor that's at the front. It's more of your upscale bar life. We do weddings every year. We have an amazing front lawn that looks over the Joseph Sound. And then the other parts are community there. Dineen's an amazing place to visit, hang out with the locals, true Florida vibe. I love it so much. I'm sure, I've been to the Fenway Hotel before for a wedding. So now I'm thinking I probably have tasted your cooking because I remember the food being Really, really good. Chef, I know you mentioned what you have in front of you is going to be served tomorrow for a special event when it comes to Savor. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that for viewers? Anything that you want them to know? No, this is our prequel. So we're super excited to be invited to Savor this year. I'm extremely excited to see a lot of chef friends. I think this is an amazing culinary gathering. This dinner we went, it's gonna be our first time with the style, but we're gonna be super interactive around our hotel. We're trying to showcase our sunsets in the evening and we wanna show our chef counter or speakeasy. So every little bit of this will be our mixologists having their time, our chefs having their time and we're just pairing it together and having a good evening. And let's talk about, are these recipes that a lot of people want to mimic at home? Always. I am 100% on sharing. We're a knowledge-based place, so any questions I get, we'll share whatever recipes we have. Our job is, once we're done with a recipe, we move on to the next one. And anything for, we always have to ask, Chef, I know you go to these events, there's some picky eaters, which is surprising if you show up to an event like that. anything for them we so we will we um you know i work with everybody um i'm a true believer and everybody should have a four to five course meal so anything we can do to make our guests feel you know appreciated and you know it's uh it's been a fun journey we learn a lot by you know allergens um you know particular styles of um food that they eat so it's uh it's cool to see the different adjustments in food and you know it's an exciting time for um you know a lot of our young culinary students. I love it. There's an amazing community mission behind this festival, supporting local breast cancer initiatives. Are you able to talk a little bit about that? Say that one more time, sorry. I know you're good. I said, I know that the community mission behind Savor St. Pete goes back to local breast cancer initiatives. Are you able to talk a little bit about the mission? I'm 100% on board. I think our whole community is. I myself, I've found our family in some situations. We are a huge supporter, our company, our local organizations, we are willing to work however we can. So I'm extremely excited for Savor to be a part of it and continue the research development and however we can support, so. Definitely, and give me the details as we wrap this up, chef. If people wanna head out to Savor or I know there's that Savor the Bay boutique dinner, us all the details so dinner is officially packed but you can catch us in our restaurant that night as well to come check us out and then the big piece will be come find us at savor we have an amazing dish that we're putting out we have our smoked beef cheeks we're gonna have a french onion mousse and a little tartlet shell uh super excited to be there and you know hopefully everybody if you got time come see us all right uh well chef we really appreciate you for joining us and really being our guinea pig here, Chef Clayton Perret, live from our kitchen here at FOX 13 Studios. We appreciate you and we hope you have a great time. You as well. Thank you. Thank you.