Hotbox
Page 9
In 1971 (the same year White appeared in Vogue), Driscoll was a thirty-two-year-old former ad man, trying to move from producing TV commercials into moviemaking. When catching up with an old friend, a well-connected editor at Glamour, he told her that while his script was making the rounds he was helping his boyfriend, Christopher Idone, open a restaurant in Soho. She told him they were crazy: first, because she’d never heard of Soho and, second, because there were already too many great restaurants in New York and too few caterers of distinction. She said she’d make a few phone calls, and that’s how Idone and Driscoll began routinely catering small private dinners for eight to ten people, working out of their Forty-Eighth Street apartment, and starting the firm, Glorious Food, that would dominate the New York catering scene for two decades. Driscoll was salesman and accountant. Idone was chef and food stylist: he’d spent a couple of years cooking in Italy and France, and during his time in Paris he had been taken under the wing of the cook for the family he lodged with, who’d shown him how to shop the markets and prepare impressive meals from what he found there.
Word of mouth spread about these elegant young men doing French-style,1 white-glove service, and then one day in 1972 Driscoll got a phone call from a woman representing Fieldcrest Mills, who told him the North Carolina company was launching a new line of sheets, and she needed them to cater a cocktail party with a raw bar at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Decorative Arts. The event was larger than he and Idone had ever attempted before, and there was an unusual catch: she wanted an ice sculpture of an American eagle.
“If you can’t do the eagle,” she said, “you don’t have the job.”
Idone said, “What?! Ice is what falls on the floor when I open the freezer!”
But Driscoll had a showman’s mettle. He’d been an Irish step dancer growing up and majored in theater at Emerson College. Like Donald Bruce White, he’d also performed for U.S. soldiers in traveling productions, having served in the army in the early sixties as a song-and-dance man. In his advertising days, he’d grown accustomed to never saying no to a client. He told her they’d do the job.
Driscoll made a few phone calls and soon had found a master of ice sculptures in New York, the twenty-two-year-old banquet chef at the Plaza Hotel, Jean-Claude Nédélec. He asked if Nédélec could carve an eagle for them.
“How big do you want it? Do you want lights?” Nédélec replied.
“Just get me an eagle,” Driscoll said.
When Nédélec pulled up in front of the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in an old station wagon, with three hundred pounds of ice hand-chiseled into a perfect bald eagle, Driscoll had no idea this diminutive Frenchman would not just become his new partner in Glorious Food’s rise, but end up devising and codifying most of the techniques for large-scale cooking that became standard for all caterers in New York City and beyond.
To learn that part of the story, we had to get a conversation with Nédélec. Driscoll warned us that an appointment with Nédélec was highly unlikely, the chef was just too busy. But we knew Bob Spiegel, cofounder of Pinch Food Design, whom we’d interviewed for this book a year earlier, had worked in the early eighties at Glorious Food. We knew we were getting somewhere when we contacted Spiegel and he said that for him Nédélec was like a father figure. Spiegel brokered a joint meeting exactly three months after our session with Driscoll, at a bar around the corner from Pinch, in far West Chelsea.
In that meeting Nédélec confirmed, almost word for word, Driscoll’s ice eagle story. But in his telling, he knew almost immediately after that first greeting outside the station wagon that they’d be working together again soon, because Driscoll seemed to be making it up as he went along.
“Where do you want me to set the eagle down?” Nédélec asked him, and Driscoll’s face went blank. He’d forgotten to order a table to display it. They called for a re-run from the up-and-coming rentals firm Party Rental Ltd., and Nédélec told Driscoll, “Listen. Next time you have a party, call me. I freelance, and I’m going to help you out.”
Nédélec had grown up in the tiny Breton town of Coray, a military brat whose father was transferred with the family, first to Germany and then to Paris. In 1963, just fourteen years old, Nédélec apprenticed in the kitchen of the grand Paris hotel Le George V, the 1920s white art deco palace steps from the Champs-Élysées where Eisenhower had lodged during the liberation, where Marlene Dietrich lived for most of the fifties, and where John Lennon and Paul McCartney would, a year later, write “Can’t Buy Me Love.” During Nédélec’s short tenure there, the hotel held a cooking competition among its apprentices, grand prize of which was six months’ tuition at L’École Hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland.2 Nédélec won, and he excelled at the school, especially in ice-sculpting classes. Shortly after graduation, he left Europe to visit an aunt who lived in Queens, New York, and to attend the 1964 World’s Fair. He was so taken by the lifestyle, and the directness of Americans, “how they tell you everything on their minds right now,” that he stayed.
Nédélec found a tiny apartment in the East Village and bounced around the kitchens of small French and German restaurants in Manhattan for several years until his aunt secured him an interview at the Plaza with executive chef André René.3 Nédélec started as chef-rôtisseur (the meats station) but was soon promoted to banquet chef, a position that came with a forbidding spatial challenge: the banquet rooms at the Plaza then were hundreds of yards away from the kitchen. The hotel had been getting by serving lukewarm food and using electrified proofers, but Nédélec hated these flame-free warming boxes: they took hours to get to temperature, and when they did they still weren’t hot enough. He was concerned, from a safety perspective, that the food was spending too much time in the bacteria-friendly danger zone, so he started experimenting with a prosaic aluminum transport cabinet—no cord or electricity required, used primarily for moving large amounts of room-temperature or chilled food around a huge kitchen—and Sternos. And what he found was that this hotbox, properly loaded with little flames above and below the food, was very effective at getting fillets of salmon to temperature and holding them there. Using sheet pans, you created zones in the box, and controlled the heat in each zone with the number of Sternos you placed on each pan. The only other major variable was the door—it had to be left ajar to get enough oxygen to feed the flames, but not so far open that the heat you needed was lost.
Nédélec taught himself—using only his senses as guides—the temperatures and times it took to rewarm various browned meats and fish and par-cooked side dishes like grains and vegetables, and he perfected techniques of modulating and controlling the heat.4 It’s an insanely analog system, a bit like piloting a hot air balloon, but it’s ruthlessly efficient, self-contained, safe, scalable, and cost-effective to run.
When Nédélec began freelancing for Glorious Food, Idone and Driscoll were still schlepping supplies on the subway in baskets, mostly catering parties for eight to twelve people. And they’d only accept one job every few days, to ensure they had time enough to recover from the previous event and to prep for the next. Nédélec’s banquet intelligence allowed them to increase their workload, and they started catering parties for the Fifth Avenue retailer Henri Bendel. Through that contact, they made inroads into the fashion industry, luring in Bill Blass, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein as clients. They brought Nédélec on board full-time in 1976—incidentally, the same year former model and stockbroker Martha Stewart opened a catering firm out of her home kitchen in Westport, Connecticut. With Driscoll as pitchman, Idone as food stylist, and Nédélec as production genius, Glorious Food was unstoppable. There was a youthful, upstart, cheeky charm to the firm; when Driscoll cold-called event planners at department stores and they wouldn’t take a meeting, he’d leave a brown paper lunch sack with a bouquet of fresh parsley and his phone number.
Glorious Food had by no means usurped Donald Bruce White’s dominance. In fact, as they still struggled to produce ever larger events out of the Forty-Eighth S
treet apartment, White had bought a grand, Italianate four-story 1890s town house at 159 East Sixty-Fourth Street and installed his business and residence there. (Although it can’t have escaped White’s notice that Glorious Food soon moved into a carriage house just eleven blocks north, with a similar arrangement to his own: a ground-floor commercial kitchen in a residential neighborhood, for easy loading in and out; instead of a residence above, there was an event room. This arrangement would become a midcareer model for quite a few New York caterers who rose from apartment-kitchen industries to become mature businesses, hauling in millions of dollars a year from industrial warehouses with loading docks.)
By 1977, the year Studio 54 was founded, Donald Bruce White was a bona fide personality, and his catering company a $750,000-a-year concern ($3 million, adjusted for inflation). Hallmarks of his style proved influential and enduring in the business, and primary among them was discretion. White dropped the names of a few key clients—including three First Ladies of the United States and a smattering of Fortune 500 companies—but he made absolutely clear there would be no dish. “It would ruin me,” he said. In the press, White deftly channeled queries about certain clients to the subject of trends—another front-of-mind theme for caterers operating at the top of the New York City market—declaring that his best customers were wanting “simpler food … fewer sauces, less beef.” Veal and chicken were his most popular main dishes, and he thought people might be surprised to learn fried chicken was all the rage. Spirits consumption among his clients was way down, he reported in one interview, and a full 50 percent of them drank only white wine. “But the idea that people have given up rich desserts is ridiculous,” he said. “Everyone wants one.” Fueling White’s attention to trends was the pressure to deliver some degree of novelty while catering ten dinners a night: “I see many of the same people at the same parties. I have to stay innovative.” And as for those signature crepe parties, he scoffed. “That was in my show-off period … I flambéed everything in sight!”
White struggled to manage his clients’ desires while maintaining his own distinct style as it developed into a brand—a dilemma that would become more difficult as time went on, as the sheer number of caterers in the marketplace grew and clients felt empowered to seek ever-greater customization (precisely the dilemma Robb Garceau had articulated; you lose your identity if you’re always saying yes to a host’s desires). White told People magazine in 1977, “The client is always right. If they want finger bowls and white gloves, that’s what they get.” But he drew the line at a few elements of a party he would not abide under any circumstances: salad courses at seated dinners (“It keeps people at the table too long”) and pistachio ice cream for dessert (“Can you imagine?”).
White projected a seen-it-all bemusement in that People profile, chain-smoking and rolling his eyes while fielding telephone complaints from a client (the nuts and the coatrack had arrived late at a party the night before). The name-dropping increased with his years, and as the industry he had created engulfed him.
“There is nothing that can faze me now. Nothing,” he told the reporter, relating the story of scrambling eggs at 5:00 a.m. at Woody Allen’s, when the director’s New Year’s Eve party ran into the wee hours. That weary edge might be familiar to any caterer operating in the upper end of the market, honed by the relentlessness of delivering “the best” at whatever cost, striving every day to avoid a disaster and to make each party unique and special, knowing full well that there will always be another (possibly several more) tomorrow night. And the next night. And the one after that. When Donald Bruce White died in late May 1986, at the age of sixty-two, in St. Vincent’s Hospital, his obituary in the New York Times named cancer as the cause of death and noted that he had “dissolved” his business the prior September on account of the illness. His name would vanish from the New York entertaining scene, but the theatrical precedent he set endures, in the roving mobile oyster shucker, the Baked Alaska action station, and any time the food steals the show.
* * *
As for Glorious Food, it brought a style and sophistication to events in the mid-seventies that hadn’t been seen anywhere in the United States. Jean-Claude Nédélec had connections to supply chains for international luxury ingredients virtually unknown in American catering circles: Vacherin cheese, Iranian caviar, white truffles, scallops with the orange roe still attached. True, their dinners were in the laborious French style, with white-gloved waiters serving portions from silver platters, but if you looked closer there was a streamlined modernity to its operations. Nédélec and Driscoll dispensed with bread plates altogether and pushed clients toward an all-purpose glass, a stemmed wineglass that could be filled with white or red—or Coke, or a cocktail. Nédélec and his team were regularly using hotboxes behind the pipe and drape. Sean Driscoll had done casting for commercials in his days as an adman, and Glorious Food was the first firm to hold waiter castings, with an emphasis on attractive male5 models and actors. But the partners went a step farther, developing an in-house waiter-training program, with a Frenchman, Serge DeCluny, in the role of headmaster.6 The firm hadn’t existed when Mimi Sheraton wrote New York’s first catering guide; by the time New York published its second, in 1978, Glorious Food was named, along with Donald Bruce White and Cleo Johns, among “the establishment” in New York. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Brooke Astor, and Pat Buckley were regular clients.
Where Donald Bruce White had once been the innovator, now Glorious Food was doing what had never been done. In September 1982, ten years after the firm opened its doors, Idone published the lavishly illustrated cookbook Glorious Food, which not only showed how much the look and the presentation of the food mattered, but also became a game changer in publishing. Released by art-book publisher Stewart, Tabori & Chang, Glorious Food was among the first coffee-table cookbooks (Martha Stewart’s Entertaining, published by Clarkson Potter, and also hugely influential, appeared in bookstores three months later), and it set a standard for design-centric cookbooks to come.
As it was broadening the reach of the catering business, Glorious Food also revolutionized related industries: where Donald Bruce White had prided himself on providing props and service items from his personal collection of antiques, Nédélec returned from trips to Europe with a sample of a particular platter or serving piece, and he cajoled Party Rental Ltd. (which had become the go-to firm for most Manhattan off-premise caterers by then) into purchasing three hundred of the item for their inventory. And Party Rental Ltd. made that purchase, because keeping Glorious Food’s business was, by then, essential.
The cover of the cookbook Glorious Food expressed in a single photo the food values of the enterprise—a simple, deconstructed salade niçoise, its elegance and modernity displayed in the abundance and rare variety of ingredients—two kinds of lettuces, yellow and red cherry tomatoes, haricots verts, jaunes, and violets, the olives and nest of pickled red onions arranged in a palette-like composition. Inside, the photos, many taken in their clients’ grand apartments, immersed the reader in a tableau of seventies high-decadence (hold the polyester). If the cookbook reads as a period piece today—the comically abundant buffets, the artificial lighting, lemon sorbet served in hollowed-out lemons—Glorious Food fixed the firm’s status as the go-to shop in New York, a city about to greet the boom economy of the 1980s with gusto.
In the early eighties, the stress of the parties began to weigh on Idone, so Driscoll bought him out of the business. He made Nédélec executive chef and co-owner and convinced the shy Frenchman to appear in a full-page Dewar’s scotch print advertisement—one of the “Dewar’s Profile” series that ran from the late seventies to the early nineties. In the close-up black-and-white portrait of Nédélec that appeared full-bleed in numerous magazines and newspapers in 1984, he leans insouciantly, chin in hand, over a well-worn cutting board, in his tall paper toque blanche and chef’s jacket, a bottle of Dewar’s and glass of scotch on ice perched at his elbow. This was several years before the daw
n of the celebrity chef, and even the top chefs at the best restaurants in New York were not household names—to say nothing of catering chefs! The text that appeared alongside Nédélec’s portrait gave a national audience a glimpse at the rigors of event catering, with a gloss of self-mythologizing:
LATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: Catered the Museum of Modern Art’s reopening, with more than 10,000 people in six days.
PROFILE: Energetic. Thrives on what the rest of us might call chaos. Sees a sit-down dinner for two thousand as an intimate little gathering.
HIS SCOTCH: “Dewar’s ‘White Label,’ on the rocks. Its taste blends perfectly with the sense of accomplishment I feel when five parties have gone well. On the same night.”
By that time, Nédélec had proven himself to be gifted not only in the kitchen operations that enabled the firm to throw so many parties on such a large scale, but also as a mentor to a squadron of chefs who executed his vision from one night to the next and allowed “Glorious”—the shorthand moniker by which the firm came to be known in the industry—to expand to Washington, D.C. They opened a restaurant in Georgetown, Glorious Café, and ingratiated themselves to hostesses and institutions in the nation’s capital. They catered the Hot Mousse of Sole with Lobster and Truffle Sauce, as well as Veal Medallions with Morels, at Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural luncheon and the National Gallery of Art’s dinner for Prince Charles and Princess Diana during the royal couple’s first visit to the United States, at which dessert was, in impeccable eighties style, an apricot mousse served in a hollowed-out pomegranate.
Perhaps more than either Driscoll or Nédélec anticipated, they trained many of the same chefs who would emerge less than a decade later as the second generation of catering innovators, with their own competing firms. In 1990, a few years after his tenure at Glorious, Bob Spiegel founded Creative Edge with Carla Ruben, and, twenty years after that, Pinch Food Design (widely considered the most avant-garde of catering shops). Spiegel remains awestruck by his time at Glorious Food: cooking for David Bowie and the Queen of England, hotboxing a party when Andy Warhol sauntered in the kitchen to snap Polaroids. David Castle, who opened Sonnier & Castle in 1997 with Glorious alum Russ Sonnier, recalls his tutelage under Nédélec in the high-flying Reagan years as foundational from a career-knowledge perspective, but also fun. Following a particularly profitable season, Castle packed it up with the firm’s other chefs for a summer sojourn through France. The group traveled from Cannes to Lyon to Paris, guzzling Château d’Yquem and inhaling foie gras at Michelin-starred temples of haute cuisine. For his part, Nédélec refers to his former charges as “my kids,” and yet competes head to head with them every day—he remains actively engaged as executive chef at Glorious Food.