The Food Festival Booker, Catering to Star Chefs NYTimes.com

ON a morning early this spring, Lee Brian Schrager phoned Kimberly Yorio, a publicist who works with chefs. Ms. Yorio had been trying to figure out how to promote a client’s book, and she used the occasion of the call to ask about the New York City Wine & Food Festival that Mr. Schrager was planning for October.

Skip to next paragraph South Beach Wine & Food Festival

HE’S THE MAN Lee Schrager with Rachael Ray.

“Would you consider doing something with Ferran Adrià?” she recalls saying.

Mr. Schrager laughed. Mr. Adrià is the probably the most celebrated chef in the world. People fly to El Bulli in Spain from the other side of the planet. Who wouldn’t want him?

Ms. Yorio e-mailed Mr. Adrià’s representatives in Europe. The timing seemed right: Mr. Adrià’s latest book, “A Day at El Bulli,” is coming out in the fall.

The next day, she had his answer: “I don’t like festivals. No.”

“Oh no,” she e-mailed back, “this isn’t your normal festival. This is Lee’s festival.”

Magic words. Mr. Adrià had appeared at a festival Mr. Schrager organized in South Beach in 2006. Mr. Schrager had welcomed Mr. Adrià to Miami like a visiting dignitary, making sure he had a good hotel room, giving a dinner in his honor and taking Mr. Adrià and his wife to Joe’s Stone Crab and local Cuban restaurants.

“Great,” came the reply from Mr. Adrià. “Yes.”

No one else does or has ever done what Mr. Schrager does in the food world. As Bill Graham was to booking rock ’n’ roll acts from the 1960s through the 1980s and Swifty Lazar was to closing Hollywood deals during the studio era, Mr. Schrager, 49, is to wrangling celebrity chefs. They know him, they love him, they cross oceans for him.

What Mr. Schrager, who looks a bit like the actor Paul Sorvino and favors open-necked dress shirts, pressed slacks and loafers, asks from the chefs he has befriended is only that they show up at his festivals. As the charismatic director of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, he has in seven years transformed what was originally a one-day wine tasting event on the campus of Florida International University for a few hundred people into a four-day extravaganza on the sand attracting tens of thousands of visitors, and, this year, a live broadcast on the “Today” show.

Further evidence of Mr. Schrager’s ability to leverage his relationships will be provided this fall, when he brings a version of the South Beach Festival to New York. The offerings, running from Oct. 9 through 12 and taking place all over the city, are set to include an all-you-can-eat burger bash with Rachael Ray under the Brooklyn Bridge; cooking demonstrations in the meatpacking district with Giada De Laurentiis, Tyler Florence, Lidia Bastianich and Masaharu Morimoto; a red meat and red wine feast at Craftsteak; talks at the Times Center (The New York Times is a sponsor of the festival) by Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsay, Alice Waters and Mr. Adrià; and a dinner at Adour with Alain Ducasse as host. (Tickets for the events go on sale June 16.)

Ms. Yorio, who has known Mr. Schrager for nearly a decade, has seen him conjure spectacular events from thin air. “Lee is a guy who, if he says he is going to start the world spinning the other way, I have no doubt he would find a way,” she said.

His official job title is director of media and special events for Southern Wine & Spirits of America, a multi-billion-dollar company that is the nation’s largest distributor of alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages. The festivals serve both to expose brands distributed by his employer — like Absolut, Perrier-Jouët, Mouton Rothschild and thousands of others — and to raise money for several charities.

Mr. Schrager’s dealings aren’t about money exactly. What he offers to brand-name chefs is a combination of public exposure in the right ways at the right times, a brotherly kind of personal and career guidance and lots of coddling.

“Anything I am involved with in my life,” said Ms. Ray, “he always wants to help with and be a part of, like Yum-o, my charity. He figures out how can he help with what he does to pay me back for my support.”

Mr. Schrager’s attentiveness extends to gifts, like the custom-blended gelato he ordered for Ms. Ray from ecreamery.com. He chose her favorite flavors — pistachios and dark chocolate bits in a coffee base — and named the ice cream “Izzy’s Pick,” after her dog.

“That’s why everybody loves Lee so much,” she said. “He’s a giver, not just a taker.”

In February, a few days before the start of the festival in South Beach, he sat at a conference table with the management of the Loews Miami Beach Hotel and went over the accommodations for the talent.

“Paula Deen,” Mr. Schrager said to the general manager, Shawn Hauver. “Please tell me she has a balcony.”

“She has a beautiful suite with a balcony,” Mr. Hauver responded.

“And her security is in the room next to her?”

“Yes.”

“Last year she said, ‘I love the festival. As long as I can have a balcony where I can smoke next year, I’ll come back.’ ”

A Loews staff person continued down the list, confirming arrangements for chefs like Jamie Oliver and Bobby Flay — who needed a rollaway, who needed two double beds rather than a king?

Mr. Schrager stopped at another name: “Alice Waters, what type of room do we have her in?”

“A rotunda room,” Mr. Hauver said.

“Great,” said Mr. Schrager, relieved that Ms. Waters, the queen mother of locavores, would be housed in one of the hotel’s airiest rooms.

What Mr. Schrager gives to celebrity chefs is not just the adulation of ready audiences, but the sense that he listens to their ideas.

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