Hotbox

  He lived a life as artistically pure as a chef could in this village perched on a hill above Alba, where wild caperberries grew out of walls of the castle that housed the restaurant. He slaughtered his own chickens, rolled his own pasta, and haggled with old ladies over eggplant at the market every morning. He shaved white truffles over eggs for breakfast and drunk-drove a Fiat Panda at night with his kitchen mates. Piedmont was the experience that instilled in Patrick the values of chasing world-conquering food whatever the circumstances. But after six months of living the slow-food-focused life, he decided that what he really wanted was an education.

  “But that’s a story for another night,” he said, just as the check arrived at our table. He put a corporate card down on top of the leather folder without glancing inside it.

  I was bone-tired, but before we left I had to ask Patrick about the compromises and fudges we’d made at the museum this evening, fixing the broken sauce with a rasher of cheese, pushing hot salmon up two flights of stairs, hoping it made the journey safe and satisfyingly onto the plates and into the bodies of people we’d never meet. I wanted to know: was he exhilarated or demoralized by this—by all accounts successful—evening?

  His eyes leveled on mine and his hands came together, the hummingbird still, for just this instant. “I’ve never gotten used to cold orzo,” he said. “To bullshit fish cooked at four p.m. and reheated.

  “It drives me insane!”

  5

  The Telephone Chef, the Glorious Guys, and G.I. Joe Veterans Frankfurter Service

  Modern Catering’s Origins

  How did we get here? How did producing lofty feasts in the lowliest of circumstances—at a premium over the cost of a similar restaurant meal—evolve into a multibillion-dollar industry? As soon as we began moonlighting as K.A.s, a natural curiosity took hold that developed to fever pitch the first few times we watched Juan work the hotboxes at Fifth Avenue palaces. We also began to feel an obligation to our coworkers in the trenches: why are we contorting ourselves like this? Why is an emo rocker slinging bullshit salmon in a gilded cage? Who started this?

  Granted, catering isn’t the only time people travel with food and must consider time, temperature, perishability. Consider a picnic in the park, a camping trip, the bag lunch. Sandwiches assembled and wrapped; carrots peeled, cut into sticks, fruit washed. Pattied ground beef for burgers packed in a Tupperware container, in layers, with sheets of waxed paper between. Portable grills and beach chairs (rentals, in the catering analog). Packing frozen cranberry juice boxes, the child’s lunch kept cool ’til just after noon, that meat loaf sandwich with mayo more or less safe. “Planning” is what this amounts to in the civilian world; in catering, the reductive slang for strategic food movement is “meals on wheels.”

  We began our quest simply tracing the lineage of hotbox skill—which seemed the most critical and unusual talents of modern caterers. Robb Garceau, now the executive chef of Neuman’s Kitchen, a top firm in New York City, had been the Sotos’ teacher; he’d only ever worked in restaurant kitchens (mostly the innovative Southeast Asian fine-dining Vong) before assuming the executive-chef mantle at Sonnier & Castle, so he’d been schooled in Sternos-in-proofers by David Castle, one of the firm’s founders. We made an appointment to meet with Castle and we talked about catering history in the reception lounge on the second floor, an open-plan room overlooking the street that also housed the tasting room that had appeared on the monitor in Patrick’s office. It was the only time we ever went up there.

  Castle’s mentor in all things hotbox was French-born Jean-Claude Nédélec, executive chef for the pioneering New York City firm Glorious Food, founded in 1971. Castle had started as a waiter there in 1983, a kid fresh from Saratoga Springs with a degree in business and $300 in his pocket, and then migrated into the kitchen under Nédélec’s tutelage. “I know that Jean-Claude perfected the hotbox techniques,” Castle told us. “But I’m not sure whether he invented them or not.”

  We’d need to ask the master himself, but Castle wished us luck in that endeavor: the chef was notoriously press-shy, hard to pin down. He said we might have an easier time with Glorious Food’s founder, Sean Driscoll, but he, too, could be prickly and discreet. “Flatter Sean a lot,” Castle said. “Tell him I told you he’s the founder of modern catering.”

  And then Castle gave us another valuable lead: the true founder of contemporary meals on wheels was in fact not Driscoll but a man a generation older, Donald Bruce White.

  With our marching orders, we reached out to both Nédélec and Driscoll separately and, not surprisingly, got no immediate response from Nédélec and a polite phone call from Driscoll saying he was too busy. It was nearing the first weeks of May, when Glorious Food catered the two most important events of New York’s spring social calendar (the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Ball, a.k.a. “the Met Gala,” and the American Ballet Theatre Gala at the Metropolitan Opera). After that would be a full roster of Memorial Day parties in the Hamptons, he said, so something might be possible after then—but not too far after, because they’d already be in production for July Fourth parties in Southampton.

  In the meantime, a few trips to the New York Public Library revealed that Donald Bruce White had died in 1986, and the more we dug into his biographical details, the more we learned about off-premise catering history in general. In the decades immediately preceding the 1970s, a small party like a museum’s trustees dinner would typically have taken place in a restaurant’s private room, at a hotel restaurant, or at a trustee’s private club. Larger, lavish events—like weddings and birthdays—went down in those same private clubs or in the banquet rooms of hotels, church parish halls, and fraternal organizations (and in fact many still do). At these occasions, the restaurant, hotel, or club’s own kitchen prepared food on-site, from the chef’s own repertoire, in the chef’s native work environment, his comfort zone. Hosting a customized, off-campus party wasn’t even considered back then because the equipment and techniques for producing events in kitchenless venues didn’t exist. And dining in a dusty library or museum, no matter how grand, at that time would have violated some sense of decorum. Dinner-where-you-wished wasn’t yet an entitlement; the resident chef in his fully equipped kitchen still held sway.

  The traveling circus model of catering—an independent operator offering ultra-personalized service, who brought with her the kitchen, the chefs, the waiters (and often props and flowers) to wherever you wanted to be—arose in the early 1960s, incidentally not far from the Frick Collection. Individual caterers of quality (including James Beard, who specialized in hors d’oeuvres) had existed on a small scale throughout the midcentury, but the person who truly revolutionized the way New Yorkers celebrate, who in fact brought the category of off-premise into being, was Donald Bruce White.

  White didn’t start out working in food. He was born in Brooklyn to parents who ran a nursing home, later attended boarding school in Connecticut, and aspired to be an actor. He was just twenty in 1945 when he made his Broadway debut, in the role of a cad who punches the daylights out of a theater critic. (The real critics, as it happened, punched back, and the play closed after three nights.) White fled New York, spending four years in traveling productions including a USO tour of the Pacific, but his return to Broadway in 1949, as Charles Dickens’s son in a plodding, two-act staging of thirty-five years in the English novelist’s life, was not much longer-lived than his debut—the show closed after just five days.

  Two years later, White landed the role that would launch him into the world of food, a bit part as a real-life errand boy, delivering the ingredients to the kitchen set of Josie’s Kitchen, a stand-and-stir cooking show that ran for ten years on New York’s NBC affiliate. Its host, Josie McCarthy, went on air nearly a decade before Julia Child debuted The French Chef. McCarthy was skilled at breaking down cooking processes into simple terms and adept at extolling both the shortcuts of the postwar era—the canned goods and jarred mayonnaise—but also the fre
sh herb garden she kept in the Manhattan skyscraper where she lived. Her example and guidance inspired White to cook, and he found he was more comfortable cooking than acting. After a few years preparing small dinners for his friends in their apartments, he renovated a shabby storefront at First Avenue and Fifty-Third Street that for decades had been Caldeiro’s Fruits and Vegetables and hung out his shingle: THE TELEPHONE CHEF.

  The shop’s services would barely merit a mention today, amid the sheer numbers and varieties of competing meal-delivery services—from Uber Eats to Caviar to the thousands of brick-and-mortar restaurants offering customers the ability to order in. But in 1962, White’s notion of delivering escalopes de veau à la Marsala, duck à l’orange, or boeuf bourguignon for two people, or twenty-two, after placing a brief call, was a new app for the old phone. “In this incredible age,” marveled the New York Times in April 1962, five months after he opened, “the mere dialing of a number can obtain a weather forecast, the state of a World Series baseball game—or a fully-cooked meal delivered to the home.” In those early years, the Telephone Chef was strictly a prepared-meals delivery service. Customers called between 11:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. to place their orders for dinner that evening; White delivered the entrées with vegetable side dishes in colorful casserole pans, with a salad and dinner rolls. Prices ranged from $3.00 to $3.50 per person, depending on what main dish you chose, and White took a $5.00 deposit for each casserole pan, which he came around to pick up the next day.

  The Times writer mostly enjoyed the Telephone Chef dishes she field-sampled: “chicken tarragon … proved to be delicious”; “the salad had unusual merit … composed of a variety of greens, such as Boston lettuce, escarole, and endive.” She did, however, find fault—in a line that will resonate with any caterer of any kind in any era: “The noodles that accompanied the dish did not survive the reheating too well.”

  Straight out of the gate, White’s concept was a hit—so much so that eighteen months later two rival companies emerged, Pantry East and Casserole Kitchen, also offering chef-prepared meals delivered to the home. Whether White felt pinched by this burgeoning competition for Upper East Side hostesses’ attention or was simply eager to innovate, by 1965—the same year he moved to larger premises on Third Avenue in the Nineties and expanded to a second location in a sparkling skyscraper at UN Plaza—he’d added a new service to his business, one that would become the model for off-premise caterers to the present day. Now, instead of simply delivering a casserole, White brought to your Park Avenue apartment or limestone town house the entire party, as well as the French chef, the servers, and the kitchen equipment required to run it. Your Roper stove remained cold and clean!

  White became known for his “crepe parties,” and the paper of record was on the scene for one of his early ones, the preview for a fashion show. An employee, Louis Retailleau, a French chef with the requisite tall toque blanche, worked four propane-powered burners, turning out feathery pancakes filled with truffled chicken, seafood, or sweetbreads and ham in Madeira sauce, for white-gloved waiters to pass around to guests. But for the period-piece cast to the menu (and the fact that propane has been illegal to deploy indoors in New York since the 1980s), the crepe party reads as an “action station” that could appear in any town in the twenty-first century. Toward the end of these events, Retailleau would delight guests by asking if they’d like to have their own turns at the pan. White broke down the ossified world of venue-dependent events—the one that put control in the hands of the banquet manager of the Yale Club or the Plaza Hotel instead of the host or hostess. He sold his clients the values of consumer culture, the personalization of celebration: if you wanted a raw bar in your living room, you could have that, and he’d provide not just the clams, oysters, and someone to shuck, but an antique pewter-lined dry sink to display the shellfish on ice. His own English Coalport dinner plates were available if the occasion called for them, but if your party was downright casual, he had a street vendor’s hot-dog cart, too. He had huge polished copper chafing dishes. A silver-domed carving station. A doughnut machine. Having a picnic? He’d pack each lunch in its own hamper lined with a red-and-white checkered linen.

  A Don White party had theatrical flair, just enough and not too much for the LBJ era, and, as Gallic as his menus were, the way he contextualized his food took the starch out of the routines and aesthetics of the Franco-laden food of the time. His attention to design forecast transformations twenty years later, as “catering” became “Special Events” in the 1980s, a shift that coincided with the explosion of the charity gala as a fund-raising tool. No longer would a party be flowers and food and a band if the occasion required it: Design emerged as the first principle in the creation of a meaningful celebration; everything else proceeds from there. And in the process, every business in service to design—from florals, to furniture, to lighting, to food—would change substantially.

  In the late sixties, catering became a form of culture in the United States. A new national magazine, Catering, emerged, devoted to the then billion-dollar national industry. Nearly two dozen businesses competed in the New York market—an assortment of drop-off shops, off-premise and on-premise firms (the banquet halls, and businesses with an exclusive on a party space), and several chefs-for-hire working out of their apartments. The Telephone Chef opened a branch of his business in Southampton, Long Island, summer playground for the set who were his bread and butter (this milestone still marks a New York City caterer having hit institution status). In 1968, he catered Thanksgiving dinner for comic heavyweights Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller (and a three-year-old Ben Stiller) at their Riverside Drive apartment. Not long after, he orchestrated a surprise birthday party for Catch-22 novelist Joseph Heller at his apartment in the Apthorp, with Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft, and 132 others in attendance, entertained on piano by the movie-music titans Burton Lane and Saul Chaplin. By 1970, White had dropped the “Telephone Chef” from his listings in the Manhattan White Pages and renamed the business “Donald Bruce White Caterers.”

  The New York Times began to publish, every five or six years, listings of caterers, with capsule reviews of each firm, its strengths and its prices, and New York magazine followed suit with the kind of overview of a food culture now common in every city in the country. New York’s first catering round-up, “Don’t Cook Tonight: A Catering Guide,” appeared on newsstands on November 8, 1971. “12-PAGE PULL-OUT GUIDE TO CATERERS” shouted the cover line, and perhaps to justify devoting so much space to such a rarefied service, the editors assured readers: “You don’t need a million dollars to be able to afford the cost of having your home-entertainment chores done for you, nor do you have to be planning a blow-out for hundreds of guests.” Food writer Mimi Sheraton’s gonzo takes on the various firms zeroed in on their repertoires with a sharply tuned palate and rapier wit. The firms ran the gamut, from G.I. Joe Veterans Frankfurter Service at 370 West Eleventh Street, specializing in Sabrett hot dogs and ice-cream parties (she notes the principals can dress in army fatigues, clown costumes, or tuxedos, according to clients’ desires) to Cleo’s La Cuisine, of Maplewood, New Jersey, run by the pioneering African American caterer and North Carolina native Cleo Johns, whose corn pudding Sheraton loved so much she confessed to having traded Mrs. Johns three cookbooks for her recipe.

  That same month in 1971, Vogue devoted a two-page spread to recipes and entertaining advice by White that confirmed his status as a catering trailblazer. “Reality Food: Menu, Recipes, Tips for an Organic Dinner” foreshadows themes that would inundate the industry forty years later, when “organic,” “sustainable,” and “green” became unavoidable. Seek out “fish from clear, unpolluted water,” he recommended, “poultry … grain-fed, not shot up with unnatural things,” and wine from “good vineyards [that] grow grapes without chemical sprays.” White’s recipes included rocket (arugula) canapés, zucchini with brown rice, poached pike with yogurt sauce, apricot mousse, and organic Jamaican coffee.

  We felt we’d gotten s
ome measure of Donald Bruce White, but in all our research we found no mention—beyond Chef Retailleau and his propane burners—of hotboxes and scaling-up techniques. He’d done ever larger parties as his business grew, but there were few clues as to how he’d accomplished them behind the pipe and drape.

  But by then, Driscoll had called us back and offered up time on a sunny day in early June. Glorious Food had recently vacated the building it’d inhabited on the Upper East Side since 1981, so he was working out of a rental office overlooking Madison Avenue in the Twenties, with barely enough room for a chair for a guest. Driscoll looked like a sporty granddad, wearing a seersucker blazer over an untucked blue oxford, a fitted navy-blue Lacoste ball cap, and chunky black glasses. We’d read a few profiles of him and knew we’d get nowhere inquiring about clients, though we spied a smattering of names from the fashion and art worlds (Missoni, Burch, MOMA) and East Coast high society (Weymouth, Lindemann, Tapert) on file folders in a standing sorter on the window ledge. In any case we were more interested in his own story, and in having him connect us to Nédélec.