MUNCHIES & Morgans Introduce "Dinner Party™," A Roaming Communal Dining Experience

NEW YORK, Oct. 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Morgans Hotel Group ("Morgans") has partnered with MUNCHIES, VICE Media's food channel, to create "Dinner Party™," a one-of-a kind communal dining experience that will launch in November 2014 and begin its first season roaming the globe for the next year.

Bringing together MUNCHIES' groundbreaking content and perspective with Morgans' creativity and leadership in lifestyle hospitality, Dinner Party™ is a communal dining experience based around the ideals of creative collaboration and shared experiences. Moving from city to city, these Dinner Party™ events will appear in New York, London, Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco over the next year. Each Dinner Party™ will exist for only a moment, empowering chefs to cook the food they love in an honest and open environment that is exciting, inclusive, and interactive, just as a dinner party would be in one's home. Each Dinner Party™ will be unique, tied together by a theme, as will the guests who experience the evening. MUNCHIES and Morgans founded their respective businesses on looking at the world through a different lens, and the companies intend to celebrate unhealthy obsessions, bizarre inspirations and delicious adventures with these imaginative and thought provoking evenings.

The Dinner Party™ kitchen will be overseen by Tien Ho, one of the leading culinary innovators of our generation and Morgans' Corporate Executive Chef. Tien is widely recognized within the food community as one of the creative innovators that helped to place Momofuku on the culinary map, and is the winner of such accolades as "Best New Chef" by GQ Magazine, and "The People's Best New Chef in New York" by Food & Wine Magazine. Tien and MUNCHIES will handpick a chef to collaborate with for each dinner, creating individual experiences representative of what the chefs and their creative partners would like to express at their meals. The menus at Dinner Party™ will be experimental but always casual. Tien will work with the chefs to try new things depending on the season, a far-flung location recently visited, or a new ingredient that they've come across.

The beverage program for Dinner Party™ will feature guest mixologists and sommeliers overseen by Ryan Chetiyawardana, A.K.A Mr. Lyan. Ryan has been involved in several of the U.K.'s best bars for over a decade including White Lyan (Best New International Bar 2014) and the highly-anticipated Dandelyan at Mondrian London at Sea Containers.  He has been named U.K. Bartender of the Year twice and is known as an innovator in his field, pioneering drinks and mixology through his extensive scientific, artistic and nomadic background. Under Ryan's direction and vision, Dinner Party™ will partner with the most innovative minds in the world of cocktails, bringing together new techniques, exotic flavors, and super creative food pairings to complement each chef. 

The theme for the first season of Dinner Party™ will be "Exchange Students," in which chefs synonymous with a particular city or region will take their skills to a different city and provide a once in a lifetime dining experience to a new audience. The MUNCHIES team worked to select its favorite chefs from each city to send on the road.  The chefs will include some of the most recognized names from the MUNCHIES series "Chef's Night Out," and will be released as details are announced about specific Dinner Party™ events.

"The creation of Dinner Party™ and forming of this partnership with VICE is a perfect example of our hotels being a platform for the foremost creators in the world of food and drink to expose and share their talents, ideas and passions with the global community," said Alan Philips, Chief Marketing Officer of Morgans Hotel Group.

"These Dinner Party's provide Morgans' top guests with exclusive access to once-in-a-lifetime dining experiences while exposing our spectacular properties the millions of customers that will be the future of lifestyle hospitality through Munchies market leading content.

Limited tickets for each Dinner Party™ will be made available 14 days prior, and a select amount of seats will be held exclusively for hotel guests at the hosting Morgans property.  Please visit MorgansDinnerParty.com for additional details and to subscribe to the Dinner Party™ mailing list to be notified of upcoming events around the world.

About Morgans Hotel Group 
Morgans Hotel Group Co. (NASDAQ: MHGC) is widely credited as the creator of the first "boutique" hotel and a continuing leader of the hotel industry's boutique sector. Morgans Hotel Group operates Delano in South Beach, Mondrian in Los Angeles, New York and South Beach, Hudson in New York, Morgans and Royalton in New York, Clift in San Francisco, Shore Club in South Beach and Sanderson and St Martins Lane in London.  Morgans Hotel Group has ownership interests or owns several of these hotels. Morgans Hotel Group also licenses a Delano in Las Vegas. Morgans Hotel Group has other hotels in various stages of development to be operated under management or franchise agreements.  These include Delano in Moscow, Russia; Mondrian properties in London, England, and Doha, Qatar; and a Morgans Original in Istanbul, Turkey. Morgans Hotel Group also owns a 90% controlling interest in The Light Group, a leading lifestyle food and beverage company. For more information please visit http://www.morganshotelgroup.com.

About MUNCHIES
MUNCHIES is a website and digital video channel from VICE dedicated to food and its global purpose. Launched in 2014, MUNCHIES offers groundbreaking content from a youth driven perspective. In today's modern world, the formerly tangible pleasures of music, film, and emerging media are just one click away. Food and the events that manifest around it are one of the everlasting experiences that cannot be replicated by arcs and zeroes. MUNCHIES chronicles the wide spectrum of the global culinary experience and the diverse voices that are pulling us forward: chefs and home cooks, makers and consumers, the politics and policies of food, "front" and "back of house" restaurant life, old wives tales and innovative news, and culturally significant indicators in our modern world. Through engaging original video content, compelling editorial features, articles, how-to's, recipes and events, MUNCHIES offers a signature perspective on the intersection where humans and food connect. For more information visit: munchies.vice.com

SOURCE Morgans Hotel Group

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