Rmef "South of the River" Banquet

[NoWiser]

Hi everyone,

A small group of elk hunters from the south metro (including myself and LipRipperGuy) have been meeting for the last few months and are excited to announce the formation of the "South of the River" chapter of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.  We will be holding our inaugural banquet on Friday, April 15th at the Minnesota Horse and Hunt Club in Prior Lake.  The night will be filled with great food, drinks, and company.  We'll have door prizes, raffles, and auctions (both live and silent) for a variety of merchandise and guns, all in the name of conservation.

I'd love to meet any HSO members who would like to attend.  Please PM me for ticket information or if you have any questions.  If you would like to help with the banquet, you can either contact the members listed on the flyer, or myself.

Thanks, and I look forward to seeing you.

 

[Scoot]

I wish I could come to this, but 3 1/2 hours is a little too far to go for prime rib!  I bet it'll be fun though! 

[NoWiser]

Follow the link below to sign up for this event!  If you are looking for an excuse to enjoy a prime rib dinner and a chance to win some great prizes, their is no better excuse than doing it for conservation! 

RMEF Banquet Online Tickets

We did scrap the chicken dinner and will only be serving prime rib now, due to the difficulty in deciding how much of each we would need to serve.

[Fishalittle]

That is my big complaint with these dinners.....my wife hates prime rib so we pay for a meal she hates. I don't see the difficulty in having a check box when you register for what your meat choice is. Then you always get an envelope with raffles and such so you have a chicken card in there and it is displayed at the table. Upon food service you get what you selected. Seems easy peasy....what am I missing? Its a fun time at the event but with kids and limited "date nights" its hard to convince the other half to go when she hates the food.

 

Not to pick on you Nowiser as your event is to far for us but the ones in my area...ottertail and brainerd need to improve on the menu option!

[NoWiser]

Fishalittle,

It seems simple (and should be) but it isn't.  The problem is that many of the attendees do not register ahead of time.  For our banquet (which was a blast and a success) we had 70 people register ahead of time and about 115 showed up for it.  About 75% of those that did register in advance did so the last 3 days before the banquet.  We had to confirm meals and attendance no later than 1 week in advance with the venue.  We get charged for any meals that are not served.  At $25-$35/meal this gets expensive fast if we are wrong!  So, we have to try to guess how many people are going to be there.  Lucky for us we were close and estimated 120 would be in attendance.  At one of the previous banquets this year 50 people signed up ahead of time and 150 people showed up the night of.  It's hard enough to try to guess total attendance - trying to figure our how many of those walk-ins and late sign ups want which meal is almost impossible.

This was the first banquet for everyone on the committee.  It was a lot of work getting it up and going without experience and we are very excited to improve on the second.  I think one way we could accommodate would be to have a meal choice for all of those that RSVP by a certain date, and walk-ins (or those that sign up late) are stuck with the default meal.  Of course, then we'll still hear "Well that person got chicken, why can't I??"  We are going to have a follow up meeting in the coming weeks to go over everything so I will definitely bring up your suggestion and see if there is anyway to make it happen in the future.

Thank you to any that did attend our banquet.  I hope to see you next year! 

[Fishalittle]

I think that is a good idea trying to accommodate the early sign ups at least. Banquets are fun and we really enjoy them but prime rib is a tough meal to serve someone that isn't a fan of rare meat! These banquets used to be more male attended but that along with the hunting world seems to be changing some and that is a good thing! The only other thought I would have would be to have a 2 meat dinner with smaller portions of each such as prime rib/stuffed chicken.

Glad you had a good banquet and hats off to you and the other volunteers for helping out conservation! Thank you for your commitment!

Edited April 18, 2016 by Fishalittle