Behind The Scenes Of The NBA All-Star Weekend

Vivint Arena in Salt Lake City is no stranger to hosting 18,500 fans multiple times per week for the Utah Jazz. While that’s a legitimate culinary undertaking the likes of which happens across the NBA multiple times per night, hosting a globally recognized signature event, such as the 2023 NBA All-Star Weekend, offers a completely different approach to feeding the fans.

And a chance to set back-to-back building records in terms of food and beverage sales.

The NBA All-Star Weekend offers a three-day culinary event that requires complete reevaluation of premium spaces, merchandising and concessions. Vivint Arena concessionaire Levy, the Chicago-based company responsible for 20 NBA teams and with the largest base of clients in North American professional sports, took it all on in February with not only the team already in place in Salt Lake City, but with the support of a network of chefs and staff from across North America descending on the venue to help. It all happened just two weeks removed from hosting the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles and on the same weekend they fed over 100,000 fans at the Daytona 500.

“There is a blend of finesse and muscle in what makes an event like this,” says Andy Lansing, Levy CEO, noting that finesse is required to make the experience top-level and muscle to have the ability to push out all the elements.

Hosting a signature sporting event requires a retooling of strategies. For an NBA All-Star game, the venue operates completely different than a typical game. The NBA takes over the site, which includes ticketing and premium spaces.

“We are operating the spaces different and reprogramming to think about things a little different,” says Rich Waters, who overseas Levy operations in Utah as the area vice president of hospitality strategy. “We build from the ground up on how we approach menu, staffing and staging.”

And nothing’s off the table. “We are doing hot dogs to caviar this weekend,” says Travis Taylor, Levy’s senior executive chef at Vivint.

The inclusion of media seating, stages and additional premium spaces cut Vivint Arena’s seating from 18,500 down to around 13,000, but it didn’t reduce the culinary responsibility. Every premium space was reimagined. Some were added. And others were reconfigured to build an influx of specialty spaces unlike any typical NBA game would host.

“Each premiums space is its own private catered event,” Waters says. “Any food and beverage in this building, we are responsible.” That means there were over 300 “events” served over the three-day weekend for 3,000 guests per day in private events, part of a total of 60,000 fans served. This is all while Levy was handling special requests for NBA players and feeding about 800 arena staff two meals per day.

“People love food,” Waters says. “It is fun to customize, adapt and amplify.”

Vivint is already a premium-heavy building (it boasts 75% more premium space than L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena), which gave the team that included nearly 50 culinarians from Levy’s team outside Salt Lake City, including people accustomed to managing entire buildings willing to serve as a “runner” to get those last-minute needed items for special requests, a leg-up on hosting All-Star.

“With our NBA market share, we’re fortunate to have hosted numerous All-Star events over the years, and we’ve learned just how unique each event can be,” Lansing says. “Fan preferences change each year with new host cities. And formats constantly evolve and influence our windows to deliver hospitality. There really is no single set hospitality playbook. Like any good coach, we add and subtract plays each year, and our teams dial into what’s best to deliver hospitality in ways that are genuine to each event and location.”

Waters says they offered packages of tightened menus to each of the premium spaces ensuring they could execute it well across three days. By preselling over 80% of the packages, the team was able to plan efficiently and then focus on execution while selling twice as many packages as during a typical event in the arena.

“The intensity is different,” Taylor says about one day during the weekend compared to a Jazz game. “There is a heightened sense of what we are doing, and it is really exciting.”

It isn’t every day Taylor pairs a 72-ounce porterhouse steak with a Tasmanian lobster at one of the dozens of premium spaces in the venue. And that’s with shrimp cocktail on fresh ice sitting nearby. A larger budget and desire to show off the city’s capabilities highlights the weekend. Of course, scattering 18 ice carvings across the arena, some tucked into exclusive premium locations and others sitting grandly on the main concourse, added an extra flair to the presentation.

“People eat with their eyes, so we want out-of-town guests to say Utah has a real good food scene,” Taylor says.

The approach is different too. A typical Jazz game looks akin to a family meal. Vivint Arena is known for hosting a high percentage of families, even in the premium spaces, which means macaroni and cheese and kid-friendly items are a staple during a typical gameday experience. For All-Star, the team treated it more like a cocktail party, with an array of mini bites to compliment the main entrees.

And with the length of the event—Saturday lasted roughly seven hours—the team timed changes to the food offerings throughout.

Levy relied on both the concourse and premium to showcase local specialties. As is becoming regular across stadiums and arenas, the concession offerings at Vivint Arena skew toward a mix of Levy-created concepts and 18 local restaurants, including the most popular: J. Dawgs, Maxwell’s and Cubby’s

That allows basketball fans who wouldn’t normally attend a Utah Jazz game to get the unique taste of Salt Lake City, such as the building’s well-known dessert row, which includes specialty gelato from Bon Bon, an ice cream and cereal bar from Spilled Milk, the “dirty soda” popular at Thirst and monster milkshakes from IceBerg Drive Inn that rivals any dessert item found in North America, both for scale, taste and popularity.

“We don’t want to lose the local touch and feel,” Waters says.

Levy also reconfigured its alcohol lineup for All-Star Weekend, taking the “unique opportunity to show the best of the best.” Beverages accounted for 60% of all culinary sales, a flip from a Jazz game.

For those enjoying a premium space, Levy’s famed dessert cart—it started 37 years ago at old Comiskey Park in Chicago and the brand has a similar version of the cart at the suites in every venue it serves across North America—made a welcomed appearance in Salt Lake City.

“People gather,” Lansing says about fans peering down the suite-level hallways, “waiting for the cart.”

In all, the weekend saw 22,000 scoops of ice cream served and 4,500 gallons of soda.

Along with feeding fan’s culinary appetites, Levy was also responsible for merchandising under the company’s Rank + Rally brand. Led by Parker Bushnell, director of retail at Vivint Arena, he not only created nearly 2,000 unique All-Star SKUs—some of the most popular items were a line of shirts and sweatshirts in both the bright yellow and blue ice colors found in the All-Star logo—but managed 25 different retail outlets across the city, including 10 inside Vivint Arena, four at the University of Utah’s arena that hosted additional events and two at the NBA’s popular Crossover experience.

And the sales followed. It all accounted for 34,000 units of All-Star merchandise sold while the Levy team set multiple merchandise sales records in the arena, having completely cleared the spaces of Utah Jazz gear and in one day flipping it fully to All-Star 2023.

Bushnell says that they crafted product to cater to each location, whether the arena, players’ hotel, owners’ hotel or Crossover. And with 50% of all items only available in Salt Lake City (and not online), the team presented an exclusive feel throughout the weekend.

To help everything run smooth, Vivint Arena showcased itself as one of the most tech-forward arenas in North America, a cashless venue with the highest percentage of mobile food orders anywhere in the world with 61% of all orders via mobile or a kiosk (it was over 50% during All-Star with 5,300 mobile orders).

The first arena to go cashless, says Sandeep Satish, vice president of strategy & analytics for Levy at E15 Group and managing director of DBK Studo, Vivint allows orders via mobile—either through the arena app or simply online thanks to QR codes posted on the concourse—through self-service, such as the American ExpressAXP
-branded Just Walk Out store or via one of 12 kiosk ordering stations positioned throughout the venue.

“It is all so customized,” Satish says. “This layout is not like any other arena.”

The tech-forward mindset helps Vivint sell more in a shorter time. And it helps ease the line. “The time has been cut in half and the throughput is so much faster,” Satish says. “We are selling more items per transaction and increased our speed.”

But a signature event—whether in Los Angeles, Daytona or Salt Lake City—with all its moving parts and one-off logistics isn’t a success without execution. “It’s all about the food,” Lansing says. “The food has to taste good.”