Beyond the Plate: Why the Best Events Are About the Food and Everything Around It
A SaltBlock founder on what luxury catering really means today.
You can usually tell within the first few minutes whether you’re a guest at an event or just another body in the room. Someone thought about how you’d feel walking in. What you’d reach for first. Whether the food would come to you, or whether you’d have to go hunting for it.
That feeling of being considered is the reason SaltBlock exists.
Ryan Conigliaro and Scott Roberts didn’t start in food. They were two childhood friends from Land O’ Lakes going to UCF, attending networking dinners and nonprofit galas in beautiful rooms where the food always seemed to come last. Growing up in families where food was the center of gathering, Ryan and Scott knew catering could be better than “just enough.” Tampa’s restaurants were getting better every year, but event catering wasn’t keeping pace. So they set out to fix it.
Raise the Bar starts with the food, and doesn't stop there
The promise they made themselves was simple: food served off-site, in a field or a warehouse or a ballroom, should be as good as the best restaurant in town.
Every SaltBlock menu is built from scratch by chefs and cooked without industrial seed oils, much of it grown on our own farm and by other intentional growers. We dry-age our own steaks and run a full pastry program in-house. Each process is tailored so that food remains the heart of the night.
But Ryan learned along the way that the scratch-made, chef-driven cooking setting SaltBlock apart in the early years is the standard of good caterers now. So the team asked a bigger question: how does the whole event feel beyond the plate?
That question turned into the answer. The sourcing, the presentation, the timing, the service, and the way guests move through a room—all of it built to carry the food and enhance the guest experience.
What it looked like at the Dick's Sporting Goods Varsity Party
Give this team real creative room, and things get interesting.
A few months back, sixty creators spent three days at a party for Dick's Sporting Goods, put on with the planner Social Revelry, who told us to run with it. So we did. Mashed potatoes finished right in front of you, spooned to order with caviar, crème fraîche, bacon, and chives. Servers working the floor in belts lined with branded sauce bottles. A full-length mille-feuille, layered and plated live in front of the crowd. A banana stand pouring Banana Daiquiris and Banana Carajillos, with zero-proof versions for anyone who wanted one. And warm pretzels handed out from wooden umbrellas our team custom-built, because you cannot buy a pretzel umbrella anywhere. Ryan checked.
Notice what's missing? The moment where the party stops so everyone can go sit down and eat. The food never pulled people off the floor. It came to them, right in the middle of the energy. That's the whole idea. Pulling it off takes a real kitchen and an in-house fabrication team, which, a few years ago, we never pictured ourselves having. But now could not imagine SaltBlock without it.
Our farm came from the same stubborn streak
The instinct that builds a pretzel umbrella from scratch rather than settle is also why we farm.
Our farm grew out of an earlier chapter spent raising oysters off Cedar Key. When that ended, the team took what they'd learned about growing things and aimed it at the kitchen, planting the microgreens, edible flowers, and seasonal produce that are genuinely hard to buy anywhere else at the quality and timing an event needs. Lately we've been growing even more of it alongside our friends at Meacham Urban Farm.
Ask Ryan why any of this matters, and he keeps it plain. "It's not just one element of making it look good or taste good anymore," he says. "It's knowing what's behind the plate." Where it came from. How it grew. What it was cooked in. To him, that's the difference between handing someone a plate and actually taking care of them.
The real test is the guest nobody planned around
Ask Ryan what his job is now, and he won't hesitate to say guest experience.
How people walk in, what's in their hands in the first five minutes, what the room smells like. And especially what happens to the one guest with a serious allergy, the person who's used to getting a bowl of plain lettuce and an apology while everyone else eats.
At a SaltBlock event, that guest gets a plate made for them, every bit as beautiful as anyone else's. If something comes up last minute and Ryan's working an event at Armature Works, he'll run down to Steelbach himself to make it right.
That comes from Ryan’s front-row seat to his dad’s 47-year career in hospitality. His mom, one of the best chefs he knows, still turns up to cook when the team is buried. An event should feel like having people over to your home, where it would never occur to you to let a guest leave hungry or overlooked. For us, that isn't a service you add on at the end. It's the reason the doors are open.
Hear Ryan tell it himself
We can lay all of this out, but it lands differently from the person who has lived it for the last decade.
Ryan sat down with the Between the Details Podcast to talk through where luxury catering is heading, why exceptional food is only the starting line, and what it really takes to send people home still thinking about the event. If any of this sounds like the event experience you're chasing, give it a listen (or a watch).
Bring It to Your Table
When we say SaltBlock is raising the bar on luxury catering, we mean the food is exceptional, no exceptions, and everything around it is built to match, so the occasion feels like one thing made for the people in the room instead of a menu with some decor around it.
A wedding, a gala, a corporate evening, a backyard party in the thick of a Tampa July day. The first question is always the one Ryan and Scott asked back at those lackluster galas: what would make this one feel like yours? Then we build it.
Tell us what you have in mind.
Let's make something people remember.
