Culinary firm scores big win with rowing tournament

Staff and managers at Metz Culinary Management, from chefs to servers, have served meals to tens of thousands of hungry people over the past 25 years. The company owns restaurants including a Ruth’s Chris Steak House and 11 T.G.I. Friday’s in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and is also a large-scale caterer, with corporate clients and schools and colleges.

That deep experience led Metz to recently apply for one of its biggest project ever: food-service provider for the 2019 World Rowing Under 23 Championships, held in Sarasota County from July 21-28. Based in Northeast Pennsylvania with a new 15,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility in Sarasota for work in the Southeast, Metz beat out several companies for the project. “We went through a lot of monitoring and vetting,” Metz Sarasota General Manager Dan Thompson tells Coffee Talk. “It was a lot of background to get to the point where we were picked.”