Hotbox

  “Sotos haven’t worked prep in years,” he said. “They’ve got a daytime gig downtown.”

  I’m not sure why I’d assumed the cooks who prepped the food were also the ones who cooked it at a party, but this was the first of many revelations about off-premise catering.

  We left the kitchen and Patrick showed me the walk-in refrigerator, cool and smelling of fresh thyme and overripe lemons, where racks from floor to ceiling held raw material—bus bins and clear Cambro tubs of vegetables and herbs on the left, ranks of milk and egg cartons along the back wall, steel pans of meats and fish on the right. Past the ingredient fridge was the staging walk-in, a cold room for food already prepped to be sent to parties. Impossible as it had been for me to purchase an affordable hotbox, here were a dozen of them lining each wall, with a narrow aisle down the middle just large enough for two chefs to pass sideways. In the chilly room, Patrick unlatched the hasp of one of the doors, revealing sheet pan after sheet pan of beef filets, burnished brown, with a grayish sheen of cooled fat.

  “These’ll chill overnight and we’ll ship ’em out tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

  Next, Patrick led me down to the basement and showed me the cage in the men’s locker room that held clean aprons and kitchen towels and, beyond the locker rooms, the commercial ice maker, its huge plastic shovel hanging on the side. At the far end of the hallway was a pastry kitchen where two chefs dropped cookie batter onto waxed paper with ice-cream scoops.

  On the way back to his office, he said, “It’s a bit like Lord of the Flies in here—my kitchen production manager’s been on vacation this week.”

  “What does he do?” I asked.

  “She,” he corrected. “Pam’s been with Sonnier since day one. She puts the purchasing list and task list together every morning.” As we crossed back into the kitchen, he said, “She moves the prep train forward all day long.”

  Outside his office door was a corkboard plastered with gridded sheets of paper. Each sheet was its own event, detailing in tiny type the client’s name, venue address, guest count, run of show, and on every row of the grid the name of a separate menu item with a quantity down a column in front: 200 Mushroom Beggars Purse, 75 Salt-Roasted Salmon, 350 Housemade Marshmallows.

  “Pam is a savant,” he said. “She can scan six, eight of these grids and know we need three cases asparagus, five of baby carrots, whatever. I forget what a skill that is until she’s gone, and I’m looking at all these grids going, ‘What the fuck?’”

  Just then, Casey proffered the forms—an IRS Form W-9 and a payment authorization acknowledging my hourly wage and one stating that I’d receive no health benefits—and I filled them out. Patrick told me he had a meeting with a party planner Monday morning, my first day, so just to get my time card then from Casey and Pam would put me to work. On my way out of the building, I noticed that the loading bay doors were now open, a box truck was backed up, and the dockhand was moving those coolers and some stacks of soda crates onto the truck.

  On the street, I typed the directions for the uniform shop into my phone. Everything had happened so fast and my mind was soupy. I tried to focus on what little I knew: you made the food; you refrigerated it; it got packed onto a truck and sent to a party.

  * * *

  Monday morning, I skittered down the narrow stairs to the basement, shucked my backpack in the men’s locker room, and retrieved an apron and clean kitchen towels. I looped the apron’s yoke over my head and tied its strings around my waist, cinching the towels against my right hip. I straightened my posture in the mirror. A K.A., ready for duty.

  Upstairs, the kitchen was even more crowded than it had been on Friday. I knocked on Casey’s door, retrieved my time card, and introduced myself to Pam Naraine. There was no mistaking Pam. One of just two women in the kitchen, and in apparent age and affect the most senior staff member, she perched on a stool at a prep-height stainless-steel counter between the hand-washing sink and the punch clock, hunched over a clipboard.

  I swiped my plastic time card through the electronic reader and I scanned the room. At the far end of the hot line, a tall guy paddled something around the tilt skillet—onions and thyme, it smelled like. In the other far corner, Gustavo Zepeda—the guy who’d knocked into me Friday afternoon—worked a meat slicer, his elbow pumping easy strokes, smooth as an oil derrick. I reached between two K.A.s to pull a pair of plastic gloves from a box in the center of the prep island.

  “You know where’s the walk-in?” Pam asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Find the chives, you’re going to cut me three cups fine.”

  “Yes, Chef!” Easy. Then she showed me the knife drawer, empty except for a crappy industrial number with a white plastic handle and visible chinks in the blade. I immediately regretted not having brought my own kit. I ran my thumb along the edge and inquired if she might have a honing steel.

  “It’s not in the drawer?” She called out to the room: “Hello? Who has the sharpening steel?” All the K.A.s stopped what they were doing and looked up. “Anyone has the sharpener?” she asked. A murmured translation—afilador?—shuddered through the ranks.

  “Do the best you can,” she said, in her dulcet accent.

  I found space for a station on the second island, the side farthest from Pam’s desk. I retrieved a clean cutting board from the dish room and set up between a guy trimming beef tenderloins and a woman hollowing out blanched fingerling potato halves. I wished to be nearer to Pam’s perch so she could monitor my progress and maybe advocate for a better knife, but from what I could tell, the more senior K.A.s worked the island adjacent to her desk, closer to Patrick’s office.

  I thumbed the knife, found the sharpest two inches of blade, and made sure that sweet spot struck the chives squarely on the downstroke. Still, the pressure of the knife on the gathered stems mashed them flat against the board and the onion bits detached into a dark green, matted mess. Before long, there was a voice over my shoulder.

  “Hey, bro, don’t crush your product.” It was one of the K.A.s from the prep island near Pam. He demonstrated with his own petty knife, fast strokes of a Japanese blade that made a whispery shin-shin-shin as he cut, slicing microscopic hoops of chive so perfectly dry they sprang and rolled all around the board.

  My neighbor at the table, the one who’d been trimming a log pile of beef tenderloins and watching me wrestle chives, witnessed the exchange. “Mira,” he said, and reached for a sturdy long-handled metal spoon from a neighbor across the table. He took my dodgy knife, whipped it along the edge of the spoon handle, ten strokes briskly on each side, then dragged the blade through a clean kitchen towel, and placed it on my board. “More better,” he said, with a shrug and a gentle smile.

  It was better—not by any stretch sharp, but workable—and I continued filling the quart container, little by little. It took over an hour, and when I was done I brought my container to Pam. She had me split the chives into three separate pint deli containers, then label and date them. Above her desk, suspended from a rod, were a dozen spool dispensers of different colored sticker dots. She reached for blue, orange, and red dots and stuck them in a line on the sleeve of my chef’s coat. “Each of these is a different party, a different proofer,” she said. “One on each cup, then find the matching proofer in the walk-in.”

  I found the corresponding colored dots on three proofers in the staging walk-in and placed them inside with their labels turned to the front so they’d be easily identified.

  I wondered: whose hands would reach for these next? Would they get worked into a dish some other chef was cooking later that day? Or would they remain in their proofers and go to the site as is, for garnish? If so, how would they be deployed once they got there? Over a soup? The main course? On a canapé?

  As soon as I walked back through the door, Pam said, “Get two cases of the tricolor carrots. You’re going to wash and trim.”

  Back at my station, I set up my peeling operation. These carrots were slend
er, pretty specimens—orange, yellow, purple—hanging in small banded bunches. I trimmed the carrot greens, cut off the rubber bands, and fell into an easy peeling rhythm, carrot after carrot, reaching and peeling. Occasionally I looked up, distracted by what everyone else was doing. How did it all add up, fit together? Who makes a party out of all this?

  I turned to my neighbor, the guy who’d helped me with my knife, and introduced myself. During my chive trials, I’d stolen glimpses at Wilmer Rodriguez’s handiwork, the precision with which he lifted with the tip of his knife the silver-skin membrane off the raw beef in flossy threads, not a trace of red meat attached. He’d been shuttling four or five trays of these—one tray at a time—in and out of the walk-in. Now he was tying the tenderloins with butcher’s twine, handling them with firm plumping motions even as he cinched his knots—each loop of twine spaced so evenly from one knot to the next that it looked as if it’d been done by machine.

  “Qué fiesta la carne?” I asked, a clunky, off-translation of “What party’s that beef for?”

  “No lo sé,” he said, shrugging.

  It dawned on me as I peeled those carrots, watching Wilmer’s virtuosity with a thousand dollars’ worth of beef, that I’d need to get used to the dislocation of task and result, of labor and outcome in this kitchen. It hadn’t occurred to me that simply knowing the who, what, where, and why of one’s handiwork—information every home and restaurant cook takes for granted—might in itself be privileged information.

  Pam came around as I was nearing the end of the carrots, now piled to the rim of a huge plastic lug I’d found in the dish room. She rapped her knuckles twice on the table next to my cutting board. “Now blanch them in a pot of salted boiling water and shock in an ice bath,” she said.

  The continuity from peeling to blanching felt like a gift. I portioned batches, dunking them with a spider skimmer into the boiling water, not too many at a time, so they turned luminous orange, yellow, purple—tender enough, but still snappy, and they glowed even brighter once they hit the ice bath. When I was done, Pam asked me to label the lug with the date and store it in a staging proofer marked “General Prep.”

  “What party are the carrots for?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “Get me a case of green beans from the walk-in. Trim and blanch, just like the carrots.”

  “Yes, Chef,” I said, but I was thinking: how long could I keep this up? With no outcome to envision, the labor felt robotic, unrelenting. My peers at the prep table seemed unbothered, chatting softly to their neighbors, mostly in Spanish. I introduced myself to Danita Holt, the woman making fingerling potato cups with a melon baller. She had her own business on the side doing wedding and birthday cakes. She’d been working prep for Sonnier & Castle for years. Years!

  When Patrick returned later that afternoon, I asked him if there were some parties I could work that week, but he said the next few days were slow and he and Juan Soto had to give priority to their “muscle.” He explained: Juan’s like a one-man staffing agency, Patrick’s connection to however many chefs and K.A.s he may need on a given night; on slower nights, he may give first refusal to Sonnier & Castle’s top party chefs. I wondered if I’d ever get there: muscle. He held out hope: things were ramping up, fall was going to be busy. But during that first week, there were times I thought I’d fold and retreat back to my writing desk. I picked flat-leaf parsley and thyme until my fingers turned green. I halved eight thousand champagne grapes in an afternoon. There was a rhythm to every day: the longest stretch of work got done in the morning, 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Then we broke for an hour-long family meal, followed by roughly two or three more hours (after the heavy lunch, these dragged on forever). And then the pack-out began: at around 3:00 or 3:30 p.m., Patrick or Tyler Johnson, his sous-chef, would migrate to the loading dock, often with another recruit in tow, and begin checking, item by item, ingredient by ingredient, that the hotboxes and coolers headed to the parties held every element for every item on the menu. The loading bay doors opened; the box truck backed up. There was some comfort in this flow, and in the serial geography of the space: you made the food in the back; you chilled it in the middle; you packed it out at the front.

  Just the moment I thought I’d crack, Pam did something especially kind, or gave me a more challenging assignment, showing she was beginning to have some faith in my work. Her cheeks were high, smooth orbs under her eyes, and with a prominent chin her look at rest was a half-smile. She was a woman of few words and clear boundaries. I’d asked how her vacation was and was met with a wordless, contorted expression: do I know you? Still, her eyes sparkled through these corrections. My fourth day on the job, Pam asked me to reduce some prunes in sherry while I was slicing a haunch of prosciutto on the meat slicer. I forgot the pot on the stove until I caught a whiff of burnt sugar in the air. “Shit!” I said, a little too loudly. The prunes were ruined. I looked to Pam, panicked that I was going to get reamed, or at the very least a dreaded “Coaching and Counseling” form (for lateness or poor performance). Pam only giggled a little and reached for the pot handle.

  “I’ll take care of that,” she said. “Finish slicing the ham and Wilmer’s going to teach you to french lamb chops.”

  So I learned new techniques, typically overseen by Wilmer. Wilmer, a Mexican American man in his late twenties with a Don Corleone mustache, showed me how to trim fat and fleshy matter from each lamb chop’s gently arcing bone so it ends up a lollipop-like bulb of clean red meat. It’s a task with its own frustrations, to be sure: sometimes—who knows why—the micron-thin layer of sinew that covers the bone doesn’t peel away cleanly and I’m left to whittle the bone bare with the back of my knife. And as much as I try to leave the gummy lamb blood in its package before discarding the plastic, during the time I’m working with the rack it leaches red goo all over my cutting board. Rationed hand towels are the only way to keep my board clean and dry, soaking up the liquid and knots of silver skin, but after about five racks, my first towel is so thoroughly soaked through with blood that it can’t absorb any more, and I realize there are twenty-eight more racks to execute. I’ve completed only four in thirty-five minutes. As for Wilmer, he’s done with his and has started in on mine.

  * * *

  The more time I spent working prep, the more I was intrigued by Pam. Her title—kitchen production manager—didn’t even begin to articulate the role she played, sitting at the intersection of so much knowledge, materials, timing, and labor. Patrick was in awe of her talent divining yields of multiple ingredients across multiple party menus, but I was equally impressed by her role as living cookbook for Sonnier. There were no master recipes, nothing written down, so from memory she deputized the thousands upon thousands of recipe instructions to her charges efficiently, firmly—Get me the lamb shanks from the walk-in. You’re going to pull the meat and portion it out—and always with a disarming smile. I never once saw her lose her cool. She was essential to the operation of this kitchen—full stop. How did Patrick manage even a minute without her? I’d later learn the owners could scarcely recall a time when she wasn’t in charge: over twenty years ago she’d been operating a Guyanese food kiosk across the street from the warehouse Russ Sonnier and David Castle began renting to create their first catering kitchen, in a former auto repair shop on Forty-Sixth Street. They were customers of her cart, and they saw she cooked with a refined palate and a solid work ethic. So they hired her—this was in the earliest days, before the gas line to the kitchen had been installed—and in a very short time, with just a couple of parties under their belt (a small buffet for an American Movie Classics screening, The Last of Sheila, and a cocktail party for two thousand at Saks Fifth Avenue), they found she was a fast prep chef and also a quick study: she needed to be told only once how they wanted something prepared. Moreover, she could delegate and communicate that knowledge accurately and efficiently to teams of young K.A.s. Ever since, she’s been at the center of Sonnier & Castle’s kitchen, its institutio
nal memory as the executive chefs she works under come and go.

  Those first weeks in the prep kitchen I peeled dozens of cases of carrots, chopped quart upon quart of chives, and I came eventually to appreciate something in the rhythm of an endless, repetitive task, one that turns you so inward you forget anyone’s there, and snap back to reality only when the timer on the oven buzzes—so loud the sound seems to lodge itself between the back of your neck and your throat. The only silver lining to that panic-inducing reveille was the clock hanging over the door to the dish room, showing three and a half hours had passed in an instant.

  At Sonnier, as in many catering shops, the day is divided into a prep shift and an event shift. It’s rare that any kitchen worker—the prep K.A.s—would cover a party shift the same day, simply because it’s not physically realistic to expect someone who woke up at 5:00 a.m. for a 7:00 a.m. kitchen call to be on his feet all day, slicing and dicing until 4:00 p.m., then roll into an event shift from 5:00 p.m. until 10:30 or midnight.1 But I learned those first couple of weeks that the prep/event split went beyond simple logistics and the limits of human endurance. Whether you work prep or event is character defining, it’s part of who you are, and you rarely cross over. Working events pays better, but the accordion effect of the party business means you might not work a single event Sunday through Wednesday, but you’re booked Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. By contrast, prep K.A.s are virtually guaranteed (except in the barren, wedding-less days of January and February) an eight-hour workday every day, even if all the fiesta action that week falls on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday; with twelve parties crammed in prime time, there will always be something to prepare on a Monday. So prep K.A.s tend to be men and women with children to come home to, or people with longer commutes, or just younger kids in their twenties, who prefer to spend their weekend nights at bars rather than on the job. Event K.A.s are typically more independent, more mercenary, and have that improvisational skill set suited to making food happen in makeshift kitchens with rudimentary tools. They typically cover for their fluctuating hours by freelancing for a number of different caterers, or by having a steady daytime gig—assisting a private chef, working a breakfast or lunch shift at a corporate cafeteria, or, like the Sotos, at a so-called drop-off caterer.