by Matt Lee
Called to the unknown emergency, I leave Jhovany’s kitchen and pass through a dark, curtained-off concourse of the Armory packed with enormous black crates of lighting and sound equipment, electric cables snaking along the floor. I jog under a thirty-foot-tall wooden archway and into the vaulted drill hall, washed in streams of majestic light from high above. Waiters and service captains scurry like a colony of ants between two rows of long tables—arranged parallel to each other and angled in a chevron pattern facing a stage, where a technician performs a mic check: “One TWO! One TWO! TWO!”
I spot Chef at the center of the commotion, standing next to a speed rack, and a dozen or so K.A.s like me streaming toward him in their white jackets and black beanies. The tables are glittering with all the cutlery and glasses, and the presets—square china plates of what look to be an assortment of small bites—are down. Fitting with the gilded theme, the curtains defining the perimeter of the room seem strafed with gold leaf. The nature of the crisis still isn’t evident.
“All right, listen up!” Chef shouts, pulling one of the white plates from a speed rack. “You see this beautiful tapas plate? Look carefully how it’s arranged.” The group closes in around him, murmuring. He talks us through the geography. The square plate is divided into three rows. Bottom row, left to right: a Smoked Whitefish Toast with Beet Relish, a Grilled Shrimp Toast with Lemon Aioli, then four bias-cut grilled crostini7 in a compact pile. Second row, left to right: two thin rods of Manchego cheese, one resting on the other, forming an “X”; two pitted dates stuffed with herbed chèvre, one leaning against the other. The top row of the plate is empty, because the servers would soon be placing three shot glasses filled with more menu items across the top: Smoked Duck Rillettes with Pickled Cippolini; Black Olive Tapenade with Toasted Fennel, Chili, and Orange Oil; and Five-Spice Roasted Almonds with Cayenne and Sea Salt.
“But,” Chef says, “they can’t even begin setting the shot glasses down until we clean up the mess they made when they dropped these.” He picks up a plate on the nearest table, which appears to have been dropped from a height of a couple of inches. Cheese and dates have toppled off each other and rolled around the plate. One of the toasts is facedown atop the other and the crostinis have skidded everywhere.
“We’ve got seven hundred and sixty plates to make perfect in the next ten minutes. So divide up, swarm the room. Do what you need to do. Make every plate perfect!”
I set out for the tables closest to the stage, so I can sweep in one direction. Gustavo’s at the far end, closest to curtain, and I work toward him. Only about every third plate is wrecked as badly as the one Chef showed us, but every preset needs at least fifteen to twenty seconds of handwork. I avoid doing the multiplication or thinking too deeply about how much time and labor might’ve been saved with a short sermon to the service captains about the importance of a gentle drop. I try not to think about how far behind I am now on my peppered beef, how reamed I’ll get during hors d’oeuvres serve-out. Instead, since the primping required so little cognition or skill, I begin to revel in the vaguely disconcerting thrill of simply being on the main floor.
Unless a K.A. or chef is working an event with an action station—omelets, say—guests will never see a chef jacket on the floor. A head chef might allow kitchen assistants to steal a peek at the dining room if it’s really impressive, or if an uber-A-lister like Beyoncé or the Dalai Lama is there, but to spend a stretch of time like this out here happens only once in a blue moon—usually when someone’s fucked up, like now. The longer I’m on the floor, the more I can glean what’s happening beyond the kitchen. Who will be eating these serrano-wrapped logs of Manchego we’re setting in beautiful crosses, just so?
On the stage, a woman rehearses the beginning of a speech, introducing the charity the event will benefit. Public funding of the arts is imperiled, and her organization raises money to educate children about the visual arts, theater, music. She introduces a film about the charity. The light in the room dims and those gold-streaked curtains turn into video screens on which a short documentary begins. Teenagers from public schools all over the New York area testify that learning about the arts from this organization has inspired them to dream big.
The film ends, then starts at the beginning again. I have one table down and have started the next when a team of servers follows in behind us, working a speed rack stacked with sheet pans of shot glasses holding the rillettes, the tapenade, and the almonds to set down on the plates. The children are inspired all over again. Two tables done. The film stops and the house lights come up. A man in a suit steps forward and introduces a performance artist, who will be honored. Tall, dressed in many black floor-length layers, the artist steps to the microphone: “My mother and father were war heroes in Yugoslavia, in World War II…”
We finish fixing plates and the servers have set down all their shot glasses. The floor is emptying—of the production technicians, the kitchen assistants, the servers rolling speed racks back toward the kitchens. Only a few captains remain as I sprint through the archway, down the dark back hallway, to return to the kitchen.
“It was crazy!” I tell Jhovany. “The servers mangled the preset! I had to redo hundreds of plates!” He just shakes his head slowly, shrugs. Each of his hors d’oeuvre stations now has four platters ready to go, and the servers gather around, idling, chatting with their captain. At my station somebody has set up four platters with perfect examples of the beef-on-toast, and Jhovany shows me a near full sheet pan of backup on the speed rack—not enough to cover the duration of the cocktail hour, but I’ll be okay if I can keep up. A sigh of relief settles in my shoulders. The captain says, “Go!” The servers descend, and the first platters disappear, toward the early birds in their tuxedos, ambling into the hall.
I reach for a sheet pan, pick up the brioche toasts, and start laying them down. Boom, boom, boom. Saori sets up another platter of her shrimp. Jhovany hovers, tells her the stripe of char powder on her plate doesn’t look right. The team’s in crunch mode. We’re not the ones saving kids with the arts, nor are we war heroes. Earlier that day, I learned there’s been a flood in South Carolina, a town an hour or so from where Ted and I grew up. A childhood friend’s father has lost his home, but at least the family is all safe. Others have drowned, and I hunger to connect with friends there, to find out more. But in these unraveling minutes, the size of the celery-root slaw, the direction of the crostini on the plate, and the angle of the Manchego cross are my world. Because that’s why I’m here: to cater.
2
Not the Sharpest Knife in the Drawer
Ted Works the Prep Kitchen
In the weeks after I first met Patrick Phelan, executive chef of Sonnier & Castle, at the James Beard House, I kept up with him online, “liking” his Facebook posts about obscure nineties punk bands and “hearting” the food porn he posted to Instagram—painterly, swooshing abstractions suited as much to gallery walls as dinner plates. That July, he and his wife, Megan, invited me for a simple Sunday supper at their apartment in Greenpoint. Petite and intense, Megan had been a pastry rock star for Michelin-starred restaurants and was now head baker at Sullivan Street Bakery, where she led three shifts of crews baking breads and pastries, 24–7, in two Italian ovens, each the size of a suburban garage. Patrick, it turned out, was an actual rock star—or almost one—fifteen years ago, among the first artists signed to a small indie label in Richmond, Virginia, that now boasted Grammy winner Bon Iver. He’d recorded three albums before food took over his life.
After dinner, I asked if I could trail him in his kitchen, to find out more about catering, and he was sanguine. My brother and I had logged hundreds of hours in restaurant kitchens with a reporter’s notebook in hand, interviewing chefs as they worked, but the loftiest position I’d ever held in a commercial kitchen was porter—summer 1988—bearding mussels, trimming strawberries, and scrubbing pots at my uncle’s restaurant in Toronto. I’d ended up metabolizing my love of food in different ways, beco
ming a food writer and a cookbook author, developing and testing recipes for six or eight people—twelve at the most. All I knew is that I wanted to see firsthand what it took to scale up to hundreds and thousands.
The Monday following our supper in Greenpoint, I emailed Patrick some links to stories Matt and I had written, the kinds of pieces I thought might emerge from time spent in the trenches with him. When I heard nothing back for a month, I assumed he’d gotten spooked. But we didn’t waste any time. Matt and I started networking in the catering and special-events world, reconnecting with an old college friend who’d gone to work for a top party planner in Brooklyn designing product launches for Louis Vuitton and galas for the Metropolitan Opera. I cold-called a chef named Robb Garceau, the ace hotboxer the Soto brothers had credited for teaching them the skills that set them on their path. To my astonishment, when Garceau answered my call, he said, “I know who you are.” He explained: as executive chef for Union Square Events in 2008, he’d been the chef at my wedding. Our wedding food had been perfection—barbecue served family style—but from a back-of-house perspective especially memorable since a waiter had spilled a platter of chipotle-butter-basted salmon down my suit (the dry cleaner the caterer sent it to worked a miracle!). Garceau seemed intense, unflappable, and happy to talk shop. By that time, he’d held the executive chef position at four of the city’s top firms, so we put a date on the calendar.
“You’ve seen salmon on a seersucker blazer,” he said. “Remind me to tell you the story behind the sprinkler head that sits on my desk.”
And, hoping to get a head start acquiring skills on the hotbox, I started hunting for one to field-test in my home. I figured I could find something dinged-up and cheap like the one in the photo the Sotos had shown me at the bar after the Beard House dinner. With two hundred dollars’ cash that I hoped would cover both the unit and its delivery, Matt and I strolled the blocks of the Bowery where a smattering of restaurant-supply stores hawk their wares—some new, some well used. The nomenclature for these rolling metal boxes, it turns out, is loose. At our first stop, the proprietor spoke only halting English, and when I asked for a hotbox, he pointed to a stack of four or five nesting, heavy-duty brown plastic insulated carriers the size of beverage coolers, but with hinged doors on their sides.
“A proofer?” I asked. He led us deeper into the store to a shiny version the size and shape of the Sotos’ hotbox, but with a glass door and a panel of knobs and push buttons across the bottom, like a very tall electric Crock-Pot. Not our quarry.
At the next place, we got schooled by a man in a cashmere mock turtleneck over his huge belly, sitting behind a desk. When I asked for a hotbox “on casters,” he countered, “Are you baking bread? Or you want a Cres Cor?”
I described it as best I could and he said, “You need a Cres Cor. Cadillac of sheet pan cabinets.” He pulled a thick catalog from a desk drawer and flipped it open to exactly what I’d seen in the Sotos’ photo, the header at the top of the page revealing yet another name for these things: transport cabinets.
“This is top-of-the-line brand-new,” he said. “Twelve hundred, let’s do thirteen with delivery and call it a deal.”
Now that we knew the lingo and steep sticker price, plan B was scouring the websites of Craigslist and Amodeo Auctions. Michael Amodeo, king of New York restaurant liquidations, is a Scorsese look-alike who sets up his auctioneer’s podium, a paint-splattered ladder, in newly defunct cafés and bistros every day, selling for cents on the dollar the fixtures of chefs’ dashed dreams. I’d once scored a nearly new $900 Italian commercial coffee grinder—the kind with the hopper and doser you’ve seen in espresso bars—from an Amodeo auction for thirty-five bucks. But after tracking online listings for a few weeks, we just couldn’t find a used hotbox. Were these things like farm tractors—so durable, so valuable, they maintain their value indefinitely, rarely hitting the resale market?
Then, one Friday on the cusp of fall, I was in my apartment kitchen cleaning up from a lunch I’d cooked for visitors and nursing a midafternoon glass of rosé when the phone pinged with a text from Patrick: “Busy next week can u work prep?”
I didn’t even look at my schedule, and in my wine buzz I typed, “Sure.”
“K.”
My phone was silent fifteen minutes. Then twenty. Twenty-five. I poured another half-glass of wine and settled at my desk.
Ping! “Need u 2 do HR forms ASAP.” Then, before I could even tap into the calendar … ping! The address of Sonnier & Castle, in the West Forties. Ping! “3pm, k?”
HR? This was serious. I’d been thinking to trail him for a couple of days, then see how it all shook out. Now I was the one who was spooked.
It was two o’clock, and he was more than an hour away. But I dumped the remaining wine in the sink and texted back: “C u there, 3:15 more like.”
* * *
This close to the Hudson River, Manhattan had a forlorn, olde New York cast, with battered taxis spilling out onto the street from low-slung garages. I hustled through the neighborhood fast as I could, past a brick barn where the Central Park tourist horses were getting their hoofs reshod. Sonnier & Castle’s masonry facade was sleek and matte black, with no signage at all. The central loading bay and the entry doors flanking either side were set with milky opaque privacy glass, all shut tight. I knocked on the door discreetly marked “Deliveries,” and in seconds it opened a crack, the toe of a well-worn Air Jordan wedged in at the bottom. I stepped up and found myself on the loading dock, where the shoe’s owner, a lean guy in black jeans and a black Sonnier & Castle T-shirt, wrestled a few coolers the size of coffins in front of the bay door. At the far end of the room was a pair of swinging doors whose porthole windows glowed the unmistakable fluorescence of a working kitchen. Just outside the doors, in a small office to the left, was a chef in a white coat, a stocky guy with a shock of sandy hair, staring intently at a computer.
“I’m looking for Patrick Phelan,” I said.
He glanced up and shouted, “Watch behind!” Just then the door of a walk-in refrigerator whacked my shoulder and a chef backed out from it carrying a sheet pan of grilled red peppers.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Be more careful coming outta there, Gustavo,” said the chef from his desk. Then to me: “In the kitchen, door’s on the left.”
I followed Gustavo into the sharp light and warm hum of a kitchen at full tilt. Nearly twenty people, in white coats and black beanies, stationed around the perimeter of two stainless islands, worked knives and peelers on their boards. Patrick was in his chef’s coat, at a computer on one side of an office closet too tiny for me to step into. He introduced me to Casey Wilson, his assistant, and apologized for having gone silent the past couple of months; the company had had their best month ever in June, he said, but then July had slowed down, so there’d been no need for more hands.
He glanced at his watch. “Fifteen minutes ’til pack-out, but I can give you the two-dollar tour.” To Casey, he said, “Can you print a set of new-hire forms for me?” And then he stepped out into the kitchen, which seemed spacious enough, maybe six hundred square feet—not the cramped galley I’d seen in many New York restaurants, but there still wasn’t room for a fly-on-the-wall journalist in this shop; he needed me to work. Along one side was the hot line: two six-burner ranges, two double-basketed deep fryers, and a stacked double oven. At the far end of the line was a tilt skillet, a heated rectangular pan the size and depth of a baby’s crib that I’d only ever seen in hotels.
Once I signed the paperwork, he said, I’d be a K.A., and by Monday I’d have an electronic time card for the punch clock on the wall. I’d earn ten dollars an hour in the prep kitchen, twenty-five working on-site hours at parties. And I’d need a clean chef’s coat. At home I had a rack full of chef’s coats I’d been given at festivals and cooking schools, festooned with corporate logos and my name embroidered over the breast pocket. I didn’t see anything like that in this kitchen.
“Okay if it
’s got my name on it?” I asked. “Or a logo?”
“No logos, no colors, no names,” he said. “White coat. Black shoes. Black pants. Black beanie. Go to OK Uniform in Tribeca. They’ll hook you up.”
“And we’ll provide aprons. And knives,” he said. “You can bring your own blades if you want, but I wouldn’t. They tend to disappear.”
Come Monday, Patrick said, I’d be working these islands or at the prep table running the length of the wall opposite the hot line—fryers and burners were manned by his senior people. At the kitchen’s far end was the dish room, where I’d find clean supplies on racks: cutting boards, pots, plastic containers. The kitchen assistants worked silently, heads down—Chef was roaming the floor. One sliced beautiful beef filets from tenderloins while another belted his rosy pucks with butcher’s twine and filled a steel pan with them.
Just then, a third K.A. picked up a full pan of the filets and tipped it up until they all tumbled into the fryer, erupting in a loud white noise of crackle-burbles.
“Wait!” I said. “What was that?”
“That, my friend, is how you sear six hundred filets in a couple of hours. A few minutes and we’ll have the color on those exactly where we want it.”
This sounded like Soto-level intel so I asked, “Where are Juan and Jorge?”