Hotbox

by Matt Lee

  During rare moments of downtime during my weeks in the prep kitchen, such as at the lunchtime “family meal”—when the most junior K.A.s sat on upended plastic crates and coolers on the loading dock—they’d say: “Never seen you before, bro. Are you Prep? Or Fiesta?” And even though I was “Prep” in fact and in pay grade, I desperately wanted to be Fiesta.

  A couple of weeks into working prep, I turned a corner. I now knew where the parchment, the slotted-spoon drawer, the shelf of red-wine vinegar were, and better knowledge of the kitchen made movement around the floor smooth and intuitive. The names and faces of my prep mates were familiar, and those early days when it seemed to be a roomful of individuals doing isolated tasks for Pam seemed like eons ago. I noticed that K.A.s relied on each other in small, almost indiscernible ways. If you went to the recycling closet with an empty cardboard box, you grabbed your tablemate’s cardboard, too. If you were closest to the oven when that deafening alarm went off, you silenced it, yelling, “Ti-MER!” at top volume to signal whoever’s pan of lasagna or tray of crostini was in there. You saw the communal lug of ice almost empty and took the initiative, hustling down to the basement ice machine to replenish it, because you knew the other K.A.s and Pam were watching and would have your back next time you were in a bind.

  One Friday Pam’s realm morphed into a test kitchen, and became almost silly with happiness. A meatball party had been booked for the following Monday; we needed to R&D eight different meatballs, including a lobster meatball, a chicken cordon bleu meatball, a lamb gyro meatball. Pam spent the morning sketching out each recipe, and then after family meal she assigned each K.A. a meatball to test. I got the chicken cordon bleu and I experimented with ratios of ground chicken, egg, panko bread crumbs, salt, black pepper, and poultry seasoning, bundling the mixture around cubes of prosciutto-wrapped Gruyère. I fried them in batches of a dozen or so, then distributed each iteration to Pam and my prep mates. We all tasted each other’s handiwork. Miguel’s first try on the lobster meatball was decent, until he toned down the lemon zest a bit. Then it was superb. Danita hit the lamb gyro meatball on the nose her first try. Pam high-fived everyone as they turned in their recipes—they wouldn’t get produced ’til later—and then asked if I’d prewrap the prosciutto-cheese cubes so they’d be ready to go Monday morning. It was a fingertip-minuscule, sticky-dreadful task, cutting the prosciutto and wrapping it, and by four o’clock I was only 100 cubes in. I needed 350. Michael and Adolfo were about to punch out, but they both stepped up.

  “Stay on the ham,” Adolfo said. “We’ll wrap.” We spent the next hour wrapping and chatting. His parents worked the kitchen in a restaurant near where I lived; he’d been their delivery guy for years, knew every building in the neighborhood. When we were done, I started to thank them, but Adolfo cut me off.

  “Naw, man,” he said, untying his apron, reaching his fist out for a bump. “In here? We work as a team.”

  Still, the disconnect between prep and party wore me down. The following Monday, those sheet pans of prosciutto-wrapped Gruyère had disappeared and Pam proffered two bunches of rosemary for me to strip and mince. Over the weekend, another K.A. had pattied up the cordon bleu meatballs, par-fried them, and by the time I’d caught up with them they were already being packed out. Where every challenge and triumph at the cutting board at home yielded a sensual or social gratification, fulfilled within a few hours, here every sheet pan and quart container vanished into a box truck, driven to some ballroom or library or museum. Yes, it ended up on somebody’s plate—I knew the work we were doing here was the engine of the operation—but the lack of closure, not knowing the who-what-when-where-why, was like flipping a novel open, reading halfway through, then throwing it away. And repeating the exercise, ad infinitum. Could I possibly last another week at this? Two?

  PREP FACTS

  For vegetable crudité for 1,000 guests at a Sonnier & Castle event, number of pounds each of carrots, celery, haricots verts (green beans), and fennel required: 50. Number of pounds of red peppers: 60.

  Pounds of lamb shanks needed to yield 400 five-ounce portions after trimming and cooking: 250.

  Pounds of short ribs required to yield the same number of portions: 400.

  Pounds of beef filet to yield that number: 200.

  Pounds of veal bones needed to make a 12-gallon batch of red wine sauce: 150.

  Number of 750 ml bottles of red wine: 24.

  Ounces of red wine sauce yielded per batch: 1,536. Ounces, per portion, sent to parties with main courses requiring it: 1.

  Pounds of white onions Pam orders to yield 1 gallon caramelized onions: 20.

  Pounds of white onions Neuman’s Kitchen chef Robb Garceau orders to yield the same quantity: 22 pounds.

  Number of 2.5 ounce balls of burrata, an Italian cheese made of mozzarella and cream, sold to Neuman’s Kitchen clients in 2016: 325.

  Number sold in 2018: 12,388.

  Piece count of baby lamb chop hors d’oeuvres sold during the 2017–18 holiday season: 7,832.

  Number of lamb entrées sold during the same period: 0.

  Number of homemade pig-in-blanket hors d’oeuvres sold in the first seven months of 2018: 24,991.

  Number of lobsters cooked in a calendar year for Neuman’s Kitchen mini lobster-roll hors d’oeuvres: 3,500.

  Yield in lobster meat of those lobsters, in gallons: 89.

  Yield in mini lobster rolls served: 28,493.

  Percentage yield of a trimmed and cooked boneless pork butt for pulled-pork barbecue: 50

  Percentage yield of a trimmed and cooked bone-in pork butt: 652

  Yield, in portions, of a 2.5 lb Florida Red Snapper: 2.

  Yield, in portions, of a 5 lb one: 3.

  * * *

  Sources: Pamela Naraine, Sonnier & Castle; Robb Garceau, Neuman’s Kitchen

  3

  The Client Is (Almost) Always Right

  Ted Investigates the Sales Function

  Late into my fourth week working prep, I was in a post-lunch daze slicing Yukon Gold potatoes on a mandoline when Patrick burst into the kitchen. He carried a hotel pan1 of pearly white, raw fish fillets. Sous-Chef Tyler Johnson and a senior K.A. followed close behind, bearing their own Cambro buckets and sheet pans. They dropped everything on the stainless prep island opposite the grill and, as if on cue, the K.A.s stationed around that island began silently packing up their boards and knives, Pam lending a hand as she ushered them toward the far end where I was, closest to the dish room.

  Patrick pulled down a printed grid from the corkboard outside his office and caught my eye. “Off-load those potatoes,” he said. “I need you on this tasting. You’re on garnishes and plate wipes.”

  A tasting! A few weeks back, he’d told me he’d been “killing it in the client tastings,” a forecast of how busy fall would be. “The tasting” was where a party was sold—or wasn’t—and the more he spoke of it, the more I imagined a tasting to be as potentially humiliating as a casting call. You cooked for a bride and groom, or a hostess with her event planner in tow, or a half-dozen members of a nonprofit board—and after some ruminations on the savor and texture of the fish, you immediately were gonged or you won the job. Patrick loved them, since a tasting was catering at its most controlled, most restaurant-like level: one end of the prep kitchen was transformed into a hot line; proteins were cooked to order; a garde-manger station was set up—where the plating of cold dishes like hors d’oeuvres and salads happened. And there were none of the wild cards of being off-site, no thunderstorms, tents, dodgy generators, or Sterno—he was cooking with natural gas, the stove bolted to the floor. The food porn he shared on social media mostly emerged from these tastings, since the comparatively small number of guests served meant he could nurse every plate until it was a photograph. The challenge was typically in the number of different dishes you had to present, an array of options showing off the range of the kitchen’s talent—more hors d’oeuvres, first courses, entrées, desserts than anyone would ever serve
at an event, much less eat; the point was to push the tasters to say yes, and to zero in on whether they’d prefer the branzino or the short rib.

  Here also was Sonnier & Castle’s best opportunity to express its personality, its brand. Of course Patrick would want to dazzle the judges in an audition like this, but it’s also, just as crucially, the optimal moment for the chef to plant ideas and set expectations. It’s the first skirmish in catering’s ongoing negotiation between what the client wants the food to say about her and what the caterer wants the food to say about the firm. Patrick’s confidence, charm, and gifts with the English language, I suspected, would put him at an advantage in this early stage.

  “Make me a pint of plate wipes for serve-out, and get these spotless,” Patrick commanded, pointing to stacks of white platters and round salad and dinner plates on the prep table. Pam, assuming correctly that I didn’t know what a plate wipe was, pulled a basic white paper towel from the dispenser above the hand-washing sink and showed me how to fold it into sixteenths, the size of a matchbook, and to wet it with tap water but then wring it as dry as possible by squeezing it like a vise between two palms.

  By the time I’d made the plates sparkle, Pam’s end of the prep island had been organized into a pickup line. The client was a theatrical-marketing company who’d never heard of Sonnier before it booked this tasting. It was a long shot, Patrick surmised, but if he won the job the fiesta would be a dinner for nine hundred in the Temple of Dendur2 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The menu seemed straightforward: two different buffet sets, each in a theme the client had chosen: “Little Italy,” in Patrick’s interpretation, featured a salad of favas, pecorino, and mint and branzino with fennel. “Uptown,” which included beef short rib with black truffle bordelaise, Patrick apparently had read as defining the luxurious zip codes surrounding the Metropolitan Museum. Each buffet had two plated salad options, a fish, a meat, and two side dishes, all to be served family style. Twelve items in all, not including the three desserts.

  “Pull me some mint, oregano, and marjoram,” Patrick ordered. By the time I got back from the walk-in, some prep angel had placed a pair of small, sharp scissors on the island, and I set to work cutting the innermost, brilliantly green upper leaves of each frond of mint. After the previous weeks in the prep kitchen wondering where in the cosmos my labor was headed, these clear parameters were a relief. I was in a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end—and it was in development at that very moment! There were deliverables, and an audience arriving imminently to consume our food and render judgment. I understood my role in the operation—small as it was—and my scissors quivered with the anxiety of the curtain raiser.

  A service captain in suit and tie rolled a half-proofer into the kitchen and parked it at the end of the table. “I’ve got some news: they’re early,” he said. “They’re only three, not four. And they only have an hour for us.”

  “Grid says two,” Patrick said.

  “I’m telling you what Sales just told me. They have to leave at three.”

  “Tyler? Ted?” Patrick called out. “We’re on.”

  And then everyone was in motion. In ten minutes, Tyler had all four salads plated and on sheet pans and the first two options—a beet salad with shaved sheep cheese and an asparagus/smoked salmon combination—in the proofer and headed up in the elevator. I’d never been to the floor above, where the tasting room and the Sales Department were—a kitchen assistant had no reason to go. I’d seen men and women who worked upstairs because they came down for lunch each day, chatting mostly among themselves (much louder than the K.A.s). It had been a warm fall, and they talked a lot about the weather—rain plans were enacted or not based on the forecasts of a party-rentals guru they knew, a sailor who lived on the East End of Long Island who had the latest information from maritime sources.

  Patrick and Tyler were side by side at the stove now, each wielding four pans, a hot blur. Patrick crisped skin on the branzino in butter, Tyler glazed short rib in a glossy brown goo. The platters filled, then I scattered my pretty herbs. After the first buffet dishes went upstairs, there was a pause in the action. In Patrick’s office, an ancient monitor the size of a loaf of bread broadcast a fuzzy black-and-white overhead shot of the tasting room. I recognized a man on the Sales team from family meals downstairs, but no expressions were discernible—just amounts left on plates and platters that, in concert with strategic calls on the phone above Pam’s desk, determined the timing of the next dishes. Deliberations over the first buffet items took longer than anticipated, well beyond the half hour they’d claimed as their limit. They had yet to taste “Uptown” or the desserts.

  On the monitor, the waiter and captain began to clear plates and platters, and we sprang into action. The half-proofer came off the elevator and I ferried the dirty china and cutlery into the dish room to make way for platters of the new buffet dishes. By then Lucy Astudillo, the pastry chef, had come upstairs and was tending to desserts. Once those had gone out, Patrick asked Tyler, “Landmark Tavern when this is over? I’m ravenous.”

  “Sure,” Tyler said. “I missed family meal, too.”

  Just then the phone above Pam’s desk rang and Patrick picked up. “Be right back,” he said, and he flew out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

  I wasn’t hungry since I’d eaten some rice and beans and leftover chicken wings at the family meal, but I wanted to be present for their postmortem. It was nearly 3:30 p.m. K.A.s were wiping down their stations with sanitizer, streaming out of the kitchen to the locker room, heading home. A cocktail reception later that night had already been packed-out, and there were no other fiestas on the calendar for the evening.

  While I waited for Patrick to finish, Pam and I butchered a few pineapples and skewered them into kabobs for a luncheon the following day. Twenty minutes later, Patrick had yet to come downstairs, when Tyler emerged from his office.

  “Check this out,” he said. He was watching the tasting room on the monitor. On the screen, Patrick was gesticulating animatedly, in an intense conversation with the clients, whose body language did not read favorably to us. Tyler smiled wincingly, shaking his head. “I’m starving. Let’s go,” he said.

  We headed south a few blocks to an Irish pub on Eleventh Avenue, a last vestige of the old neighborhood. Tyler ordered a burger and a beer. I ordered a beer.

  He’d grown up in Seattle, majored in biochemistry at Evergreen State College, and worked at a pharmaceutical company for a few years. But his creative spirit rebelled against corporate life, so he’d checked out, enrolling in cooking school in New York and finding work in the kitchens of Gotham Bar and Grill and Momofuku. Sonnier & Castle was his first stint in catering; he’d been there almost six months. What he missed most about working in restaurants was “owning” your mise en place, he said; in catering, someone else always performed the basic prep tasks for you, and you didn’t necessarily know who’d done it, or even when. You’d reach for a container of washed, picked mint from the walk-in and there was a decent chance it might be dried out or slimy. In my brief prep experience, the greatest hazard of communal ingredient ownership seemed to be more quantitative than qualitative.

  Then Patrick walked into the dim bar, still wearing his chef’s coat. “Done deal, guys,” he said.

  “What?” Tyler asked, incredulous.

  “They asked a shit-ton of questions. It was brutal,” he said. “But we got the job.” Then he waved the bartender over and ordered a basket of fries and a Stella Artois. When his beer arrived, he hoisted it and said, “Here’s to making the sale.”

  * * *

  That first tasting, at least from the prep kitchen perspective, made the genesis of a party seem so simple, so routine: Chef conceived the food and cooked it, and the clients tasted it, approved, and signed the contract. But Sales, I’d soon learn, was a more layered enterprise, with salespeople typically playing educator, nanny, shepherd, and diplomat, too, in a perpetual struggle to keep the stakeholders in alignment and t
he party on track from birth until the final guest departs. Just as the menu for a sales tasting may evolve in the run-up to the audition, the menu for the event itself is an ever-evolving document. Revisions are inevitable, typically coming down fast and furious in the last months, days, even hours, before a party. They can be as random as a host deciding he wants to add a crudo (raw fish) course; or that he’d prefer key lime pie rather than strawberry rhubarb. Changes related to vegetarianism and allergies are common, as guests in recent years have become increasingly expressive of preferences and intolerances in their RSVPs. And the purchasing landscape may change in an instant if, say, a hurricane takes down the Florida stone crab crop for a week or two. The local strawberry season may peak two weeks early. Apropos of nothing, the party planner could add a bright new idea—s’mores station, anyone?—at the last minute.

  But the first principle I learned about sales is that repeat business prevails and sustains the industry. The cold-call tasting for which I’d been herb wrangler is relatively rare, except in catering shops that specialize in weddings. It’s the reason that the business of corporate and nonprofit event sales is especially insular, almost like a guild, with client relationships that span decades. These relationships take finesse to maintain but, once secured, some sales experts are able to carry those connections wherever they go, to different catering firms. Patrick knew one salesman who’d closed a deal by finding out the prospect’s shoe size and delivering to her office a $900 pair of Manolo Blahniks.