Gourmet Pizza and Wine Pairing

Reservations are now open for our annual pizza and wine fundraiser!

For several years I have been partnering with my good friend Sam Allen to host a pizza and wine fundraiser. Sam is the wrestling coach in our school, and was lamenting on how hard it is to come up with original fundraising ideas, especially something that didn’t require our students to sell a certain number of tickets or products to family and neighbors. (Parents who are reading this are nodding and sighing in agreement!) At that time I was the moderator of the stage crew, affectionately nicknamed the "Stage Rats." He said, “Maybe I should pair up with you and we could call it “Stage Rats and Wrestlers.” I told I’d do it just for the name and the chance to design a logo!

We settled on a Gourmet Pizza Party and Wine Pairing, since that was unlike anything other teams or clubs were doing. We used the round tables in our student dining room, with tablecloths to the floor, real tableware (no plastic, please!) cloth napkins, centerpieces and candles. The wrestlers were the wait staff with Coach Allen as the maître d’ and Stage Rats manned the kitchen with me. The menu included a soup, five gourmet pizzas paired with carefully curated wines, and a homemade dessert such as tiramisu cream puffs or lemon mousse-filled cannoli with a blueberry drizzle.

We took a deep breath and decided to sell only 40 tickets and to charge $100 per person. We were worried that we might price ourselves out of the market, but the first event sold out in two and a half days. One parent remarked: “If my husband and I go to a nice restaurant in Chicago, we’ll easily spend $80 apiece on a meal without alcohol AND have to pay for parking! This is a bargain.”

The fundraiser was a hit and has become an annual event, with some people wanting to reserve whole tables before we even advertise! Planning the event every year and bringing it to a successful conclusion has also deepened our friendship and created meaningful memories for us, our guests and our students.

If you might be interested in joining us, click HERE to order your tickets. We're located just outside of Peru, IL, but if you're from further off and want to make a weekend of it, rooms are available at the Bethany House, our monastery's guest facility. In case you are wondering about this year's menu, here's the lineup: