Hotbox

  By the time he told me to clock out from prep, the truck had circled back from delivering those four catered receptions around town and the loading bay had a calm-after-the-storm aura. The sun dipped over the Hoboken cliffs, darkening the street, and most of the kitchen crew left for the day. Only the provisions for our museum dinner party were left to pack and the handful of re-runs already called in from two of the other parties. So I helped Patrick roll the top-heavy hotbox on its janky casters across the metal tailgate and onto the truck. We wheeled it into place against the back corner, alongside a giant white cooler, a red plastic dry pack, and a bunch of milk crates with the bar items. We locked the casters and he strapped the proofer against the wall to minimize movement over the potholes. “Fuck it,” he said. “No point taking a taxi, let’s ride with César.”

  So we hopped up into the cab of Sonnier & Castle’s white truck, an Isuzu Turbo Diesel with the company logo emblazoned on its flanks alongside a larger-than-life decal of smiling servers in gingham shirts. I settled into the sticky vinyl bench seat and then César pulled us out into traffic, trundling east—haltingly, it was rush hour—along Forty-Eighth Street, toward Times Square. I felt the diesel engine idling inches beneath us, the seat warming, and I thought about the ice melting in the cooler that held the tuna tartare and the Parmesan cream sauce. Eighteen (four extra, for safety) perfectly portioned pieces of Atlantic salmon and the three orders of yam dumplings—the vegetarian option—were back there, on separate sheet pans, beneath tight layers of plastic wrap, slowly but inevitably entering the zone. Patrick pulled out his file folder with the event brief to check who the service captain would be and how many servers under him—there would be two. For fourteen guests, we’d have a total of seven employees on-site. As for the pairs of hands that had gone into prepping and loading all the material we’ve got on board? Easily thirty, maybe even forty.

  I ran some numbers in my head. Weren’t there dozens—maybe even hundreds?—of restaurants in New York City that could accommodate these fourteen guests comfortably, in a private room, with exquisite food, impeccable service, a beautiful environment? Wouldn’t it be more efficient, safer, more sustainable (in terms of all kinds of resources, but especially human ones), and even less expensive to hold this dinner meeting at an acclaimed restaurant? How many years had this gig been Sonnier & Castle’s?

  Patrick tapped the directions into his iPhone and the map of the route pulsed into view, its traffic grid settling dark red, and he sighed heavily. I didn’t think it was the time to pepper him with these kinds of questions, so I asked him how he got into cooking.

  As we sweated it out in Midtown traffic, he told the story. In 2000, a buddy in his band got him a job washing pots at a cozy, drug-addled Richmond, Virginia, bistro. Even from the dish pit, he found the food culture of the indie restaurant riveting. Before then, Red Lobster had been the most ambitious restaurant he’d ever dined in. In his first year, the chefs taught him the basics of cooking and soon moved him from dishes to garde-manger. One day the grill chef went MIA for a stretch and Patrick stepped up. He loved the energy of the line, so after releasing his second album (well reviewed, a U.S. tour, but no breakout hits) he returned to the grill, but found that the place was going off the rails, with waiters and waitresses sneaking shots during service. When one late-night shift ended with a brawl between a friend of the owner and a customer under the streetlamps outside the front door, Patrick stood on the bar and instigated a staff walkout.

  When the owner regrouped, months later, she forgave him his insurrection and brought Patrick back into the fold under a new head chef, Andrew Manning, a tattooed badass unlike any of the narcotics-fueled kitchen grunts Patrick had met before. Andrew immediately instituted an all-new menu, with pastas made by hand. He got rid of bread deliveries; they baked their own every morning, and he showed Patrick how to shape his first fresh loaves. Andrew retaught him the basics—blanching vegetables, making sauces, breaking down whole animals. From Andrew, Patrick learned a new way to be a chef, both scrupulous and punk-rock at the same time. You could work in a bistro in Richmond and cook like you were on a world stage, as long as you had the chops, the self-discipline, the drive. I’d seen those kitchen ethics on display, in the care Patrick took dialing in the skills of his prep K.A.s, and in his Instagram photos of tweezered food. Here was a chef gunning for Michelin stars in a Sterno world. How did catering fit into that career trajectory? Was there something—anything—about the hotbox hustle keeping him from his goals?

  As we pulled up to the stairs of the Frick’s main entrance on East Seventieth Street, Juan Soto was waiting on the bottom step. It had been months since we’d met each other at the James Beard House, and we bumped fists in greeting—there was no time for pleasantries. He unlatched the truck’s metal tailgate, as Park Avenue dog walkers hurried by. Patrick and Juan jumped up into the truck, slid the cooler and the dry packs, a large roll of brown kraft paper, and a twenty-four-can crate of Sterno to the edge of the tailgate. The last thing they fetched, together, was the hotbox. Once it’d been lowered to the ground, one of the tuxedoed servers and I rolled it over to the front steps. I grabbed for a handhold on the slippery aluminum angles at the bottom of the heavy box, and—careful to avoid tilting it more than a few degrees—the four of us duck-walked it up the six broad, shallow marble stairs of the front entrance. God help us if someone stumbled and this thing tumbled. Every particle of food for this dinner was inside there.

  Juan took over the hotbox once we got it to the entrance landing, rolling it past two security guards who held the doors open. Our polyester black pants, black clogs, and untailored white chef’s jackets were the only credentials we needed to enter this palace. I returned to the curb, grabbed the case of Sterno, about thirty pounds of ethanol fuel, and marched into the building, past the grandfatherly security guards, and past several old master paintings—a Vermeer and Rembrandt exhibition was under way, on loan from the Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague. Heading into this dinner, I was concerned not only about Juan and Patrick calling me out on some flub or amateurish technique, but about a consequence more major than that: if I accidentally light the joint on fire with a hotbox full of Sternos, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art and a handful of billionaires would be toast.

  The vestibule provided for our kitchen was just off the central courtyard, not far from the entrance, a utilitarian junction where loaner wheelchairs are stored and where a service elevator empties out next to a drafty fire exit. Juan, Patrick, and I unrolled brown kraft paper and covered the floors and halfway up the walls, taping it down with blue masking tape. We set three folding tables in a U against the walls and centered the hotbox in the middle of the tiny room, close to the corner where servers would pick up finished plates. The dry pack and cooler of ingredients we slid under the tables. I opened a brand-new box of purple food-service gloves and set it out to appease the germophobe, if she came around.

  While Patrick set about assembling the platters of hors d’oeuvres (Tuna Tartare with Dijon and Diced Celery on Round Potato Crisp; Curried Chicken with Black Currant and Toasted Coconut on Bite-Size Papadum; Peking Duck Roll with Cucumber, Scallion, and Hoisin; Mission Fig Puree with Candied Walnut and Whipped Boursin on Brioche), Juan began to organize the proofer. He cracked open twenty Sternos in short order, using the outer lip of one can to open the inset metal lid of the next—ker-POP, ker-POP, ker-POP—setting each on the sheet pan until he had a full tray. He then scooped a tiny dab of the ethanol gel with the handle of a serving spoon, ignited it with a Bic from his back pocket, and proceeded to light the entire tray in ten seconds by kissing the flame on the spoon handle to the open top of each can. He then portioned the lit Sternos out onto two pans set in the bottom of the hotbox. He said he was creating a warm zone at the top for wicker baskets of bread (ciabatta piccolo, multigrain, olive, purchased from Sullivan Street Bakery) cocooned with plastic wrap; later he’d move the trays of Sternos farther up in the box, creating a hotter
zone in the upper middle where the first course—Wild Mushroom Ravioli with Mascarpone, Sweet Onion, and White Truffle Cream—got finished, and afterward the main protein, Atlantic Salmon with Creamy Parmesan Orzo, Roasted Tomato, and Crispy Phyllo. The rosy fillets of salmon in the proofer had already been seared to a nice chestnut brown in a few places back at the prep kitchen, but they were rare inside. The only other flash of color among the ingredients we unloaded from the cabinet was the magenta red of the loin of tuna, for the tartare.

  I set up a small electric hot plate at one corner of the U and, after filling a handled pot with canola oil, began to fry yam dumplings—the “silent”2 vegetarian option—in olive oil until brown, flipping once and then setting them out on paper towels on a tray, which we wrapped tightly in plastic twice for reheating later in the hotbox. It took me several wontons before I got the feel for browning without scorching the edges of the wontons black.3

  The tuna didn’t have a trace of fat or sinew, and its almost plastic uniformity and otherworldly hue told me it was institutional quality, gassed with carbon monoxide to hold a vibrant color in the freezer for many months without any signs of oxidation. But when Patrick cubed it into tartare, the translucent rubies looked beautiful against the matte black of the slate serving stone. With five minutes to go before the 7:00 p.m. start, he’d set out three platters, one of each type of hors d’oeuvre, with only the curried chicken yet to finish. By now, the trustees’ dining table had been arranged upstairs and the butter pats preset. The two male servers and the captain began to hover, one eye gauging our readiness, the other eye on the door, and ears alert to the tinkle of coat hangers that would announce that first guests had arrived.

  Once the yam dumplings were fried, I reached down into the cooler for the Parmesan cream sauce for the first-course ravioli. There were two quart containers of it, cold and dense as a milk shake, and I had to prize it out of the plastic with a metal spoon. I dialed up the electric burner underneath the pan and as it heated up the sauce began to loosen and pool. Juan looked over my shoulder, concerned it was breaking—oil was puddling on the surface. I wasn’t convinced, and kept whisking to re-emulsify the oil. I took my eye off the now-bubbling sauce just long enough that it scorched on the bottom and telltale flecks of black began to show. Fuck. I stirred now, careful not to scrape the bottom of the pan, to see if the flecks could be hidden or quarantined somehow. Juan and Patrick swooped in, conferred, and said it looked like the prep kitchen had over-reduced the cheese sauce (I sensed they might be giving me a bye). Juan spooned out some of the brown flecks and captured others with a paper towel twisted into a pointer. I attempted a hybrid resurrection of the sauce, with the good half of what existed, plus new cream and cheese, whisking to melt it through. I thought that what we had was adequate in supply and commendable in flavor, but Patrick said even that appeared broken. Patrick called the driver, César, to deliver more cream, pecorino crumbles, and shaved Parmesan, a quart of each, along with the white cranberry juice for the bar—whoever packed out this party forgot that the Frick outlaws red wine and red cranberry juice on the premises. (I could only imagine the Aubusson-staining catastrophe that had occasioned the rule!)

  We busied ourselves on other tasks, boiling ravioli and setting out the garnishes and components of the main course, and replenishing the hors d’oeuvres platters as we waited for the re-run. When it finally arrived, Patrick remade the sauce in the nick of time, simmering it down and then adding in two whole quarts of Parmesan crumbles. The sauce was basically melted cheese—nobody would complain. And then—from my perspective at least—he ruined the finished sauce with a dash of truffle oil, a chemical fabrication widely reviled by restaurant chefs with integrity, but evidently not yet verboten in catering.

  Throughout the machinations and deliberations over this damn sauce, Juan, Patrick, and I were dipping the tips of our pinkie fingers into it, scrutinizing them closely as gemstones under a loupe, tasting, then sticking fingers back in for a second and third appraisal. Honestly, if the germophobe were around, we would have needed a bucket of spoons for the number of times we had to sample that sauce. A bare finger—touch and taste in one—is the perfect tool. If you ever dine outside your home, you’ve tasted someone’s pinkie—and a molecule of saliva—a thousand times and lived to tell about it. And thankfully the person for whom this news would be the greatest living nightmare was, at least up to that point, nowhere to be seen. I really couldn’t blame her—the job-ending prospect of an ill trustee the morning after the board’s annual repast (whether or not the food was causal) might give me bleeding ulcers for days leading up to the event.

  Juan warmed up everything for this dinner simultaneously in the hotbox: the bread in the convective heat at the top, caramelized onions for topping the salmon, and ravioli (at the appointed time Juan ripped a two-finger-wide porthole in the three layers of plastic encasing the sheet pan and ladled a few tablespoons of cream sauce onto the ravioli to moisten and re-energize them for the ride). The stacks of plates were warming in there, too, gaming the distance the food had to travel—about forty yards—to reach the upstairs salon where the table was set. Directly below the plates was the salmon, finishing over Sternos in the bottom-middle of the box.

  Few guests ate the hors d’oeuvres—in fact, they were quite a tough sell. Was it the presentation, I wondered, on black slate and a bed of black lava salt? Too modernist for these antiquarians? Would a Sèvres platter have been more reassuring?

  Now, all eyes turned to Juan, whose job it was to get the eighteen portions of salmon perfectly cooked, plenty warm, but not overdone, with no flecks of white protein goo.

  At one point, during the lag between pasta and main course, as he was juggling scalding hot sheet trays in the box, the normally tranquil Juan muttered under his breath, “Fuck cater.”

  Patrick laughed. While Juan bore the logistical brunt and burns of this event, Patrick functioned as landing guide and stylist, ensuring each plate lived up to his vision. As the crew member with the least experience, I garnished and swabbed fingerprints off the plate rims.

  Miro Oliveira, the amiable service captain with graying temples, perfect posture, and an unflappable air, reported that there were thirteen diners present, of fourteen expected. Patrick and I stepped in to assist the two waiters, running trays of four plates to the bottom of the Whartonesque sweep of staircase and pausing so they could stack two on each arm and ascend. Clinking of glasses and murmurs of conversation trickled down from above.

  The dessert, round lemon tarts, bedazzled with rare salts and crushed candied violets, was so attractive that I started for my phone to capture a photo. These beauties were, I realized, a parting shot that set Patrick’s food apart from any clubhouse dinner, and the moment they went upstairs we began closing down the kitchen.

  I felt relieved—I’d screwed up under pressure and survived. And hadn’t set the joint on fire. Adrenaline dissipated, then exhaustion set in. Just as I truly ached to quit, Juan was in highest gear, figuring out what materials and recyclables could be shoved back into the still-warm hotbox—converted now to a refuse wagon—and what to junk in stiff black garbage bags. It wasn’t obvious to me among the china what was Sonnier & Castle’s and what belonged to the rental company—and they had to be kept separate. So I folded up the tables, ripped the paper off the wall, and set out some aluminum pans of hors d’oeuvres, leftover salmon, and yam ravioli with plastic forks for the service staff and security guards. Once everything was packed up and locked down, the service captain and servers would load everything out and into César’s truck, now circling back to Seventieth Street for the pickup.

  One of the museum guards, a woman in her sixties, encouraged us before we left to take a good look at Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, perhaps the artist’s most famous painting, on loan for the special exhibition. Juan and Patrick were still busy, so I walked through a central hall of the mansion, alone, and regarded the girl. And as she glanced back at me, over her shoul
der and through the centuries, her scrutiny seemed almost more real to me than the guests that night (and certainly more real than the putative germophobe). The entire evening we never set our eyes on a single trustee, nor they on us. A moment of melancholy washed over me, but it soon ceded to a more thrilling sensation. Nobody else was in the hall and I was carrying a tote bag big enough to steal the painting away. It was the first time I’d thought about the perils of granting strangers the kind of access we enjoyed that night.

  On the sidewalk outside we regrouped. Juan said he had to get back to the Bronx; he was facing a 4:00 a.m. call time. Patrick suggested that he and I repair to the restaurant Daniel, a few blocks south, for a nightcap. As we approached, the enormous brass revolving door sent forth a rogues’ gallery of Upper East Side denizens: many furs, suspicious tans, walking canes. The bar cleared out soon after we arrived, and waiters hovered, delivering to our table jewel-like mignardises,4 gratis, with impeccable timing, justifying in an instant the $22 cocktails we’d ordered.5

  “I’m like a hummingbird,” Patrick said, swooping in for a pomegranate jelly drop. As far as I could tell, he’d consumed no food the entire day except for the pinkie sips of pecorino-Parmesan cream. I knew he must be exhausted, too, but I asked him to pick up the thread of his story, back at the Richmond bistro with the cool new head chef and the faltering music career. By the time he’d finished a third album, the record company expected him to go out on tour again, but Patrick couldn’t afford the time or the expense. He was breaking up with a girlfriend, and Andrew had left town a few months before for Italy, to be chef at a trattoria in the village of Grinzane Cavour, in Piedmont. He asked Patrick to come to Italy and be his sous-chef, and Patrick hopped the next flight to Torino. In Piedmont, Patrick’s mind was blown every single day: by the glistening eyes in the fish market, by eggs with yolks the color of navel oranges. He worked double shifts for Andrew, back to back, 10:00 a.m. to midnight with no break, and learned to be uncompromising in a totally new way. When you had the best raw materials at your fingertips, if you fucked something up, even slightly, you didn’t put it on the pass.6 It went in the trash. And in time you learned to fuck up less.