Hotbox

by Matt Lee

  “In the context of a hundred-thousand-dollar booking, that nine hundred dollars means nothing,” Patrick said. “It’s good business. And it would be penny-wise, dollar-dumb for the CEO to take issue with that on his expense report.” Especially if that one booking leads to the event taking place every year for a decade.

  For most of the salespeople and chefs we polled, 80 to 85 percent of catering clients are repeat customers; 10 to 15 percent more are referred from that original clientele. In twenty tastings, they might have one or two clients who simply stumbled upon the company’s website and got inspired to call.

  You’d never guess those odds by browsing caterers’ websites, which tend to be lavish productions with alluring slide shows designed to reel in that rare fish, the new-new customer. There’s a striking similarity to all of these sites. You’ll see the close-up of a sexily perspiring cocktail rimmed with a colorful garnish, party guests laughing across a tablescape dappled by incandescence, a dessert that’s a miniature marvel of modern architecture, the uniformed server proffering a platter of something with a winsome smile. There might be a slogan: “Life Happens around Food.” “Food. Service. Style.” You may detect subtle differences—some offer menu items in descriptive terms; others are more coy, leaving the images to stand alone. Prices will never be quoted.

  The sameness of tone and content in the advertising materials obscures the grievous stresses at the heart of fashioning menus for special events and seeing them through to showtime. The primary tension is between what the client desires, your culinary dreams brought to life!, and the food-technical limitations of site, season, and available equipment—the dishes the firm knows it can execute best, most profitably, in a given situation. Another tension exists in sustaining the fiction that your party is the most uniquely important event on Earth when it’s likely one of two or three the firm is producing that very same night—fifty that month. The salesperson (in fact, “event producer” and “event director” have become more common on business cards) manages these tension lines. But the term “sales” doesn’t begin to describe the nature of the relationship that develops with the client. Should you decide to call a caterer, don’t be surprised if the sales agent who answers wants to spend hours talking about you—your journey and story are precisely what make your party different from every other one on their calendar.

  “The product is the same thing night after night—a meal of some sort,” says Collin Barnard, an independent event director who worked for Sonnier & Castle for ten years. “But it’s not just a meal, it’s: ‘Why is this meal important to you?’ We need to make sure we are catering to you, specifically. Everything has to be personalized.”

  How personal?

  A bride and groom recently tasked Barnard, now freelancing, with creating a dessert tribute to the meet-cute moment of their first date, years ago, in Rome. The groom had ordered an affogato—an Italian dessert consisting of a scoop of vanilla ice cream with a shot of espresso poured over it. The waiter, not quite understanding the groom’s accent, and seeing plainly that he was American, brought over an avocado!

  Ergo, their idea to serve an avocado ice cream affogato. The executive chef would need to devote talent and labor to researching and developing this mutant dessert. The avocado ice cream had to be scaled, cost-effectively, for eight hundred servings and—most important—it had to taste delicious with the shot of coffee.

  And if the avocado ice cream didn’t taste delicious in the R&D phase?

  “You have to be brave and tell your client, ‘We tried it, it didn’t work,’” he said. “The worst thing in the world would be to say to the client, ‘This is what you wanted. Taste our failure.’”

  Fortunately for Barnard, his chef loved this sort of challenge. But I was aware that not all chefs do. By the time I’d met up with Robb Garceau, the Soto brothers’ mentor, he’d just jumped firms, to his fifth executive-chef position. And one of the reasons he’d left his prior position was because Sales at the previous shop kept saying yes to customized items requiring research and development, or prodding him to come up with novelty food. Garceau was at a stage in his career when he wanted to make simple, beautiful food that told the story of its origin; he was fine meeting a client halfway, but he felt gimmicks diluted his employers’—and his own—brand.

  “Most salespeople won’t say no to a client,” he said. “And that’s where a lot of integrity gets lost in catering.”

  But not all of Barnard’s clients are looking for menus composed of tributes to moments in their lives. Some are more reasonable, willing to choose seasonally appropriate ingredients, and who understand, for example, that if there’s a loose run of show at their party, with plenty of speeches and toasts, they’ll need to choose food that can idle without degrading. A fifteen-minute delay in serving fish is the difference between fantastic and lackluster. By the same token, ice cream has exactly ten minutes to temper to perfection; any more, and you’re looking at four hundred bowls of ice-cream soup.

  As conduit between kitchen and clients, a salesperson is uniquely positioned to observe and respond to changes in the food culture, staying on top of what’s trending, gauging which ideas might be fads and what’s everlasting. “I’ve sold more pigs in a blanket than anything,” Barnard told us. “Every wedding has them—doesn’t matter if it’s a million-dollar wedding or not. Gluten-free and seasonality are here to stay. Molecular gastronomy was hot for a second but that’s over. We tried matcha—didn’t work!—but comfort food is perennial. People want their mac-and-cheese cups. Beef filet is still king.”

  He prods his chefs constantly: what’s the next beef filet? The next salmon? The next duck? In the past decade, short rib became a new beef filet alternative. And to date, he has never sold a single pork entrée. He’s tried to encourage vegetarian brides to embrace a vegetarian dinner menu but never had any take his counsel, though they do tend to demand more substance and complexity in their vegetarian options. “It’s no longer okay to just have a salad, or a portobello mushroom thing,” he said. “The veggie option has to be equally as thought out and as excellent as the meat option, even though we may only serve 10 or 15 percent of them.”

  Understanding that percentage of options the kitchen needs to prepare is also within the salesperson’s purview. Having just enough of each on hand keeps costs in line and waste to a minimum, at the same time ensuring guests receive the entrée they want—without an embarrassing shortfall. The art involved in these calculations favors an experienced salesperson with sociological savvy bordering on clairvoyance. For example, if it’s dinner for five hundred on Wall Street with beef filet as the main course, he may specify that the kitchen prepare just 10 percent of total attendance for the vegetarian option—even a bit less if spouses aren’t expected, vegetable love was ebbing editorially in the previous quarter, and it’s an R month (which favors meatier choices); if it’s a luncheon for Planned Parenthood with a thousand attendees, he may feel confident requesting 25 percent as the vegetarian option, year-round.

  Barnard aims to maintain a mix of different types of clients—corporate (product launches, movie premieres, awards shows), nonprofit (fund-raising and charity galas), and social (weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, birthdays, and anniversaries)—to insulate himself and his firm in economic downturns, when corporate money becomes scarce. Although the portfolio of clients may be diversified, he concurred with Patrick that the clientele, by and large, is women. “Whether she’s the hostess of the event or the director of events at MOMA, we’re always asking: how do we cater to her?”

  Through a friend, I reached out to one of those women soon after meeting with Barnard. Gina Rogak has spent twenty years directing events for museums—the first ten at the Guggenheim, the last ten at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and we met in her light-filled office in the Whitney’s massive, Renzo Piano–designed building overlooking the Hudson River. Rogak resists calling herself the caterer’s client—that would be her board of trustees, the event c
hairs, and guests. But to the catering firm, someone in Rogak’s position is Client One, and caterers will do virtually anything to charm her. While Whitney gala committee members are invited to tastings, they rarely show: it’s typically just Rogak and a few interested curators. A straight-talking native New Yorker, she never skimps on criticism. A recent tasting she found “so unimaginative it was painful. It looked beautiful, but I told them, ‘You’re selling that fresh-local-aw-shucks experience; we’re selling glamour!’” She insisted the caterer change the entrée from beef filet to one from the caterer’s repertoire she found far more appealing, a slab of halibut draped with an electric-yellow zucchini flower.

  For dinners celebrating exhibition openings, Rogak wants the menu to be inspired by the art on display, and she often requests themed menus—but nothing too ham-handed or literal, lest the food trivialize the art and, by proxy, the institution. Rogak nixed the corn bread for an opening of a show of Grant Wood paintings (too corny), but approved it for an Edward Hopper exhibition, since it seemed to her like classic diner fare. She’s put on countless Pop Art parties, including a Warhol show where a soup bowl was preset and waiters circulated, pouring the vichyssoise out of Campbell’s soup cans. For a surrealism exhibition at the Guggenheim, the appetizer appeared to be a dessert, and the dessert an appetizer.

  One item Rogak will never serve: chicken. “It’s the old ‘rubber chicken’ joke,” she said. “I just can’t.”

  I also reached out to Susan Holland, whom I’d seen profiled in the New York Times as the go-to planner for gay weddings with budgets starting at $1,000 per guest (and rising to sometimes three times that). Holland abandoned a painting career in the late seventies to become a caterer, added florals to her repertoire, but then dropped both those pieces when she realized she didn’t need to be creating the food and flowers to practice her craft. In her own broad terminology, she’s a producer, working with teams of “artists” (including caterers) to stage extravagant and ephemeral “art installations” (events) designed to be experienced in a single night. She designed several state dinners during the Obama administration.

  Holland’s fairly unique in the event world for having been on both sides of the tasting audition. For years, she cooked the tastings for her catering firm herself; now she’s accompanying her clients as they make the rounds of caterers. Every customer is different, she says, and caterers need to adapt their sales pitches accordingly.

  “Some clients want a laundry list presented to them,” she said. “Forty-five thousand different items from four traditional caterers, with their prices.” She prefers to work with those who view a party more holistically, as a collaboration with the chef: “Who’s being celebrated? Where’s it happening? What do they like to eat?” For those who are less rigid, she’ll try to steer them to the young, independent caterer Yann Nury, a French chef who worked for five years for Feast and Fêtes, the catering arm of the French restaurant Daniel. Nury insists on an initial consultation with prospective clients, to divine their preferences and parameters, and he won’t take the job unless he senses they’re giving him the freedom to bring his talents and creativity to the table.

  “The interaction doesn’t always work,” Nury told me. He was conducting a tasting of his latest creations for Holland and me at her apartment, an open-plan glass box at the top of a skyscraper in downtown Brooklyn, with a view west, toward Manhattan. Nury’s been successful enough that he has the luxury to pick and choose. He’ll only work with a select few party planners, because he’s found that the extra layer between the host and the chef can spell disaster for both. For a New York baby shower, a well-known musician couple recently flew in a party planner who revealed to Nury that the menu would be kale salad, lobster rolls, and mac and cheese.

  “I was like, Jackpot!,” he said. “I’ll do my version of these, it will be so fun!” He accepted the job, but it didn’t go as he’d expected. The party planner sent him recipes from the couple’s favorite restaurant in Los Angeles, along with photographs of exactly how the dishes should look and how they should be served—a mimicry job that he ultimately fulfilled but was none too thrilled about.

  “Why would someone choose to spend so much money on a creative caterer and then try to impose a recipe?” he said.

  Then, there is the opposite situation, which he adores. “Some people absolutely don’t want any control,” he said. “They’re like: July thirteenth, a hundred people, a hundred-thousand-dollar budget, I’ll see you on the twelfth!”

  Whether a client is pushy, or a pushover, catered events are always expensive. And even when the budget is stratospheric, the imperative for discounts and savings is likely hovering just overhead. Collin Barnard had said, “I’ve never had a client tell me: ‘Spend anything you want, our resources are unlimited.’ There’s never been a time when money’s not been an object.”

  Though many of Holland’s clients may be multimillionaires and billionaires, she occasionally has to remind them what they’re paying for when they complain about the price tag.

  “I tell them, ‘You’re not buying a diamond. Having a party designed and curated—everything brought in just for that one moment and then disappearing—just for you? A special event is the most extravagant thing you can do!”

  Whether it’s selling cars, diamonds, cosmetics, or ephemeral parties, the salesmanship of luxury products is similar: you seduce by appealing to the buyer’s needs and aspirations. But for the catering salesman, “closing” the deal doesn’t end the process, it’s only the beginning. He will work his cell phone to the bone in the months between the sale and the event, playing intermediary among the hosts, their event planner, and the chef, trying to broker to satisfaction the inevitable changes as a party evolves. Everyone will have to compromise.

  Some of the most horrific stresses in the process, in fact, may be lurking beneath the surface of that 80 percent repeat business, the part of the catering picture that seems so safe and secure. These events, often annual, like a holiday party, a new-product launch, or a dinner after the trustee board meeting, are booked by the event director/party planner. It may be a regular event, but there’s a tacit novelty imperative: the menu can’t remain the same year after year. The salesperson and the party planner work together to invent ways to make each successive party more successful than the last, and thus pressure builds as their relationship grows. The Gina Rogaks of the world take tastings seriously because there are no minor details for her—anything that goes wrong at the party (a salty soup, rubbery salmon, a humid dining room, a warped dance floor) she hears about the next morning. The salesperson and the planner are locked in a mutually beneficial, and perilous, embrace. As Danny Meyer, one of the nation’s foremost restaurateurs and owner of Union Square Events, told us in a moment of candor: “With catering, you’re basically selling security. There’s one person who books a party for five hundred people,” he said. “And if it sucks, their job is on the line.”

  4

  Fiesta in the Palace

  Matt Works His First Event

  Ted preceded me into the prep kitchen at Sonnier & Castle and helped fill me in on its general layout and key players. Still, I felt compelled to work overtime to reach his level of knowledge, to prove my mettle and commitment to Patrick and the team. So on busy days, I clocked in the prep kitchen at 7:30 a.m., then worked past pack-out, to around 7:00 p.m. One such day, heading into my eleventh hour, I began to lose my equilibrium as I broke down whole chickens. The stainless prep counters and chickens started spinning around me; I didn’t hit the tile, but I quit working extended shifts. About a month after I began working prep, Patrick tapped me for my first fiesta gig, the Frick board dinner, on a brisk Tuesday in October. The Frick Collection, as it’s officially called, is a grand museum that sustains the quirky residue of a great American steel fortune on a prime stretch of Fifth Avenue. Metal magnate Henry Clay Frick built his palazzo in 1913 for $5 million (in those dollars), with every intention of furnishing and bequeath
ing it as a museum, applying to its walls Grand Tour plunder of the highest sort, works by Titian, Velázquez, Vermeer, and Goya, as well as all the porcelain and other decorative baubles that attend high taste. It’s a paroxysm of Beaux Arts limestone, gilt, and curlicue, suitable backdrop for any royal drama.

  At lunchtime during my prep shift, Patrick had asked if I wanted to help him pack out and work an event that night, and I said yes without hesitation. And when I found out it was at the glamorous Frick, I was even more stoked. My earlier inklings of a career using my degree in art history might have had me working at an institution like this, sweating the provenance of a Renaissance chalk sketch instead of writing about country ham or catering. This event would be the last to load out, Patrick said, and super low-impact from his perspective: a CR & D1 for just fourteen guests, staffed by two chefs—himself and Juan Soto—with me as the sole kitchen assistant. It seemed easy from a logistical perspective, but he said there was a lot at stake: the employee at the Frick who booked the party was, according to Patrick, a germophobe who took her job seriously and loved nothing more than to call out the catering team on something, typically when someone’s taken off a latex glove to perform a fine-fingertip task like pinching thyme leaves from their stems. As for me, with such an intimate event, and without a cloud of other kitchen assistants hovering around, my performance was likely to be much more closely scrutinized.

  Over the course of that morning and into the afternoon, under Pam’s watchful eye, I ripped a couple of pounds of prosciutto di Parma thin as onionskin on a meat slicer, peeled a forty-pound box of Yukon Golds, sliced them, then blanched them in salted water. At around 3:00 p.m., about the time I was cleaning up my station, things got busy on the loading dock. I checked the corkboard outside Patrick’s office, saw he’d be packing out four cocktail parties—for a cosmetics company, a leveraged-buyout titan, a French champagne brand, and the ex–Spice Girl now fashion designer Victoria Beckham. Patrick’s usually level temperament gave way to high pique as he checked off items on his clipboard, his hand-crafted, leather-soled shoes slapping through the tile corridor between the prep kitchen and the loading dock. “Pam! Who has the tuna for the tartare? I can’t find the fucking tuna in the walk-in.” “Tyler! Where are your chicken skewers? This should have been loaded out fifteen minutes ago!”