San Antonio Is 2018’s “It” City

  The 2018 RIMs Annual Conference & Exhibition will be held in San Antonio, Texas, April 15-18. The timing is fortuitous.  

On May 1, 1718, the Mission San Antonio de Valero (known today as the Alamo) was established. It was the first of five missions that would grow into San Antonio. In celebration of its 300th anniversary, the city is hosting an array of cultural events throughout the year. San Antonio has also received a stream of accolades, among them Frommer’s “Best Place to Go in 2018,” Travel + Leisure’s “50 Best Places to Travel in 2018,” and National Geographic Traveler’s “Best of the World 2018” list of 21 must-see destinations, making the city one of the places to visit in 2018.

Last year, UNESCO also named San Antonio a Creative City of Gastronomy—the missions are a UNESCO World Heritage Site—the second city in the United States to receive this distinction. After the announcement, Visit San Antonio credited the city’s thriving food scene to its “confluence of many world cultures, such as Mexican, Spanish, German and French,” as well as its being the site of the Culinary Institute of America’s (CIA) third campus, at Pearl, a mixed-use complex.

Once a historic brewery, the 1894 Second Empire-style landmark now houses shops, chef-centric restaurants and a weekend farmers market. Last year, Bottling Dept., San Antonio’s first food hall, opened at Pearl in a new building that was constructed where the former bottling department stood. Five vendors offer something for everyone—rotisserie chicken, burger and fries, gourmet donuts, ramen, and Japanese healthy fare. There’s also a bar where you can order beer and wine from a list curated by the sommelier at High Street Wine Co.

“This is an exciting time for the culinary arts in San Antonio,” says chef Johnny Hernandez, a CIA graduate whose restaurant empire includes La Gloria , a Mexican street-food eatery at Pearl. Two years ago, Hernandez prepared President Obama’s Cinco de Mayo dinner at the White House. His exploration of the diverse regions of Mexican cuisine continues with the recent opening of Burgerteca, which features custom burgers topped with ingredients found in Oaxaca, Pueblo, Veracruz and Yucatan.

While RIMs attendees will miss the tricentennial festivities being held during Commemorative Week, May 1-6, they can enjoy two ongoing events happening during RIMs. Common Currents is an exhibition that illuminates the 300 years of the city’s multicultural history as told and rewritten by more than 300 visual and performing artists. The San Antonio 1718: Art from Viceregal Mexico exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art features more than 100 landscapes, portraits, narrative paintings, sculptures, and devotional and decorative objects, many of them never before exhibited in the United States, that cover People and Places, The Cycle of Life, and The Church in the first century of San Antonio.