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High rollers
Dazzle guests with
cigar catering at bachelor party, wedding
reception
By Lee Cabot Walker
for The Brooklyn
Bride
In the last couple of years, some
Brooklyn brides have decided that five nights in a Vegas
penthouse suite with an a la carte menu of sugary cocktails,
skanky strippers and racks of lamb wouldn’t quite reflect the
uniqueness of their engagement; that a wedding reception at
the foot of a Spanish castle with a 300-name guest list, 1,000
imported orchids, air-conditioned dinner tents and elephant
rides for the little ones wouldn’t exactly express the
poshness of the occasion.
Bensonhurst native Dennis
Briganti was there to help. For $975, Briganti’s cigar
company, CF Dominicana, will cater your bachelor party,
bachelorette party or wedding reception, sending a
professional “master roller” to about 50 cigars for two hours
as your impressed guests observe.
“It’s a powerful
image,” Briganti says. “Cigars are equated with status, money,
success. When you have a cigar roller at an event, the visual
is so unique that it makes a very strong impression: The bride
and groom really went over-the-top. It’s an upscale flair.”
Briganti will even send cigar servers to work the reception.
He has catered events for many clients from Brooklyn Heights
and Cobble Hill.
CF Dominicana offers about 25
different cigars, varying in size and shape, all filled with
“ligero” tobacco leaves — medium-mild leaves — from the
Dominican Republic.
While Cuban tobacco still has the
popular reputation of being the best, Briganti says, Dominican
tobacco has been recognized around the cigar industry as
superior in quality for about the last 10 years. The cigar
called the “SoHo” is his brand’s most popular. Classified by
its size as a “robusto,” the SoHo measures about five and a
half-inches long and has a large gauge — or circumference — of
about three-quarters of an inch. Its gauge, or thickness,
makes for appealingly cooler, milder smoke, and it’s wrapped
in Connecticut Shade leaves, “a mild, light-medium wrapper
that lends perfectly to the cigar blend.”
The “CF” in
CF Dominicana stands for “Cigar Flavors.” When Briganti
started the business in 2000, the focus was on offering
interesting cigar flavors — amaretto, chocolate and cognac,
for example. As an afterthought, Briganti began offering cigar
bands custom designed with clients’ initials or with messages
like “John & Tina, Sept. 14, 2004.”
Although the
flavored cigars are still available, it was the custom bands
end of the business that took off quickly, and Briganti teamed
up with master roller Juan Espinal to offer the custom
catering that now carries the custom brand’s name. They now
have in-house event planners and master rollers working for
them across the country.
“When you’re from Brooklyn,
you tend to have a bit of a street edge,” Briganti says. “I’m
aggressive. I know people. When I started advertising the
catering on the Internet, suddenly Chicago was calling,
Detroit was calling. I went to Juan: ‘Juan do you have any
family in Chicago?’ We knew a guy in LA. We
networked.”
Briganti says that in February, during the
NBA All-Star in Houston, CF Dominicana catered ’Zo &
Magic’s 8-Ball Challenge, a charity fundraiser hosted by
Alonzo Mourning, Magic Johnson and Queen Latifah. CF
Dominicana has also appeared in scenes in “The Sopranos” and
“Sex and the City.”
“It used to be that you had to fly
a cigar roller in from Miami for your event. You paid for the
guy’s lodging and food, and you paid him to be at the party.
It was unbelievably expensive. It wasn’t a streamlined
operation like a Brooklynite would make it!
“Now I’ve
got 15 cities going. It’s unbelievable.”
For
more information on CF Dominicana’s catering service,
purchasing cigars and custom-designed cigar bands, call (888)
467-8400 or visit the Web site, http://www.cigarcatering.com/..
March 25, 2006
edition |. Read more about
Brooklyn
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