Copia to Capitalize
As the center for food, wine, and the arts in Napa, Copia hopes to expand it’s struggling business to include a food and wine awards Gala, capitalizing on the hard times felt by the James Beard Foundation. According to the article in the Mercury News of San Jose, this is just a sampling of some of the future ventures of the organization.
There is no complete list of Copia’s plans, according to board members who say that new schemes are proposed every day. But among the more serious ventures is a children’s educational television series called “Gaspergoo”; a line of Copia kitchen implements and cookware; a new Copia magazine; and, ultimately, a national chain of Copia museums and stores.
Among the expansion mentioned in the article, is an ambitious 4-star 160 room Hotel set by the riverfront in Downtown Napa, and an indoor Farmers Market and food Emporium set to the west of it’s north parking lot. To help the flow of customers reach the site, a planned Shuttle will whisk prospects from the satellite Copia museum at Pier 39.
Now if they could just start turning a profit.
May 11th, 2005 at 11:28 am
Copia plans food and wine awards, other ventures
Los Angeles Times
There were no tears when the Napa Valley vintners running Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts learned that the country’s leading food society, the James Beard Foundation, was reeling from an internal financial scandal. A crisis at the vaunted Beard Foundation? At Copia, they’re calling that “timely opportunity.”
The moment the news about the scandal began circulating last summer, Copia’s board of trustees set to work on an ambitious series of new ventures.
At the top of the list: a splashy food-and-wine awards gala, intended to replace the Beard Foundation’s longstanding awards as the leading industry honors.
Copia, the 3-year-old West Coast cultural center founded by Robert and Margrit Mondavi, is jockeying to become not just the country’s culinary tastemaker, but its preeminent food and wine institution.
Besides the awards gala, Copia also plans a slew of other ambitious projects, including producing a children’s television program and turning the center into a destination resort.
Yet Copia has been struggling financially. A $20 million founding gift from the Mondavis is the institution’s cornerstone financing. But it took a $70 million public bond to build the 80,000-square-foot facility and 3.5 acres of gardens. Copia has an annual bond payment of $5 million.
To put the center on the right track, Copia recently hired a new president and director, known for his strong fundraising record: Arthur Jacobus, a former director of the San Francisco Ballet and Oakland Symphony. Most recently, Jacobus has been president of the Kentucky Center for the Arts in Louisville.
“I have to hit the ground running on fundraising,” says Jacobus, who will assume the directorship July 5. Most of Copia’s projects have the potential to create income, but nothing pays for itself right away, he says.
Meanwhile, to capture the gastronomic flag from New York City-based Beard, Copia has to take on Manhattan, the most formidable restaurant scene in the country. The foundation’s headquarters, the Greenwich Village town house that belonged to James Beard, had become, since the foundation’s founding by Julia Child and Peter Kump in 1985, a kind of private club for the city’s foodies.
Copia, on the other hand, is pure California; it bears the imprimatur of this coast’s most famous cook, Child. She was a founding adviser to Copia and allowed its restaurant, Julia’s Kitchen, to use her name.
Since the fall, when then-Beard Foundation President Leonard Pickell Jr. pleaded guilty to grand larceny after an internal investigation revealed as much as $1 million in questionable expenses, the Beard Foundation has been reorganizing.
Compared with the Beard Foundation, “Copia is a bigger, broader institution,” says Lauren Ackerman, chairman of Copia’s board of trustees. As a result, “Our venue has more to offer. We have more potential.”
California chefs have long grumbled that the Beard Awards were too New York-centric. “I don’t think what we’ve done has been recognized by Beard,” says Mark Peel, chef-owner of Campanile in Los Angeles.
Justin Perez, executive chef-owner of Restaurant O Catering in Campbell, agrees. “It’s one of my top two things in life to get a James Beard award. That’s how much it means to me,” says Perez, who has cooked at the Beard house three times. “But it’s like unattainable. They don’t even look at us in San Jose.”
It would be a refreshing change, several Los Angeles chefs say, to see the West Coast approach to food reflected in national food and wine awards.
Copia’s board members say they hope to do that, and much more. But first they plan to transform Copia into a destination resort.
Hotel planned
Copia is planning, with Intrawest, a leading real estate developer, a four-star, 160-room hotel along the nearby riverfront. Copia will have a close association with the hotel but won’t own it.
For an indoor farmers market and food emporium it’s designing with a Napa Valley-based developer, Copia will lease out a site it owns to the west of its north parking lot.
The market will be home to butchers, bakers, fishmongers and assorted artisan food purveyors. To get the crowds, the plan is for daily bus service to ferry visitors from a proposed Copia satellite museum and wine store at San Francisco’s Pier 39 to Copia’s Napa campus, about a two-hour trip.
While Copia earns 60 percent of its $14 million annual operating budget from its restaurant, gift shop and other sources of revenue, attendance has been disappointing.
Copia could easily handle 300,000 visitors a year but attendance has stalled at 180,000 visitors. And roughly 85 percent are from California.
To create an endowment as well as to finance the new projects, Copia needs to raise at least $50 million, according to board member Garen Staglin, who has been instrumental in cultivating new deep-pocketed board members such as San Francisco money manager Frank Husic and Los Angeles businessman Darioush Khaledi.
Copia also needs to revitalize its exhibits to create more excitement within the museum’s walls, Jacobus says.
“They need to enhance the visitors’ experience, make it more active, impactful,” he says.
Helping Jacobus is another new Copia hire, Christopher Conway, former director of development at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Smith & Hawken, Viking, KitchenAid, Tiffany & Co. and Target are among the first of what Conway hopes will be a long line of Copia corporate sponsors.
This is California, Conway says with a smile, “It’s build it. . . . Do it. . . . Make it happen now! Never phase it in. Never go slow.”
There is no complete list of Copia’s plans, according to board members who say that new schemes are proposed every day. But among the more serious ventures is a children’s educational television series called “Gaspergoo”; a line of Copia kitchen implements and cookware; a new Copia magazine; and, ultimately, a national chain of Copia museums and stores.
“We have projects that will establish Copia as a trusted authority, like the new Good Housekeeping seal, a nationally recognized brand,” Staglin says.
But a televised awards show is the linchpin needed to give the institution a national profile that establishes the brand, says Copia board member Jackie Applebaum, a cosmetics industry entrepreneur who also sits on the Los Angeles Opera board.
As soon as she heard the news of financial improprieties at Beard, Applebaum started pushing the idea of a Hollywood-style food-and-wine awards show. She introduced Michael Seligman, a veteran associate producer of the Oscar and Emmy telecasts, to the rest of Copia’s board.
This spring, Seligman and his partner Vic Garvey signed a contract with Copia to produce what some board members tentatively are calling “The Julia Child Awards” (though the name has not been approved by Child’s estate).
If all goes as planned, Seligman says, next spring Copia will be televising an awards show with celebrity hosts feting celebrity chefs and winemakers. With the right movie stars, he hopes to sell the show to a cable network.
Waters is opposed
If many California chefs would welcome a Copia awards show, not all agree. Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse and an honorary trustee at Copia, says, “I’m philosophically opposed” to a Copia awards show. “Copia doesn’t have the reputation” necessary to attract the country’s top chefs, food writers and cookbook authors, she says.
The Beard Foundation helped build the reputations of many young chefs, Waters says. “There is a loyalty to Beard.”
Mercury News staff writer Carolyn Jung contributed to this report.