Hi everyone, we hope this finds you well. As you can imagine, the entire staff at Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation, as well as all of our wonderful volunteers, are recovering from a very busy week and a half of lemonade activities. We had another successful Lemonade Days weekend, including Alex’s Original, the Philadelphia CBS 3 telethon, and so much more. We wanted to take this opportunity to share our experience from the event that culminated the festivities – the Great Chefs Event.

Held every year at Osteria restaurant in Philadelphia, the Great Chefs Event gets better and better every year. For the 2009 event, we once again had the immense pleasure of being joined by Tom Colicchio, judge of Bravo’s Top Chef, and welcomed Bobby Flay and Michael Symon from the Food Network, for the very first time. There were over 20 chefs there in total from all corners of the country, and even the globe as one chef traveled all the way from Italy for the event! How amazing that all these chefs came together to raise funds for the battle against childhood cancer.

When we arrived this year, we were pleased to see that the entire southbound block in front of Osteria was tented. We anticipated having over 650 guests, so this offered a great deal of additional space for attendees to walk around and mingle. The tents also kept us all dry when the rain occasionally snuck in for a few minutes, but with all the amazing food, chefs and guests, we hardly noticed the rain. There were many highlights of the night, including the participation of Cameron Robertson and Sally Ekus, two childhood cancer survivors and our heroes. Additionally, the live auction this year was especially exciting. With several great items already included (a week’s trip to Italy, seats in Chase Utley’s box & more), it was a huge surprise when Bobby Flay popped up on stage and offered to cook dinner for six in his New York City apartment! How cool is that? The item went for well over $10,000.

The 2009 Great Chefs Event was a huge success, and one that we will not soon forget. We will keep you updated with a final tally from the night, but we are sure that significant funds in the battle against childhood cancer were raised. A special thanks to Jeff Benjamin and Marc Vetri who coordinated the entire event. We seriously couldn’t do it without them, they are the glue that keeps this event together, and we can’t wait to see where this event takes us.