by Matt Lee
Sean Driscoll died of cancer a year and a half after we interviewed him, in January 2018, at the age of seventy-seven. A small paid notice appeared in the New York Times, but we were surprised there hadn’t been a full obituary by the paper, given how extensively it’d covered his work during his life. He was so discreet and private, perhaps he would’ve preferred no fuss; still, his central role over the decades in building the catering business from a cottage industry into the juggernaut it is today seemed noteworthy. A nonprofit he was involved with hosted a private memorial reception that spring that was, according to an event director who attended, thronged with “all Sean’s women.” After learning the news that he died, we returned to the notes from our interview. What struck us first upon re-reading them was Driscoll’s sharp wit.
When we’d asked him how he felt about Glorious having trained so many of the succeeding generation of New York caterers, he seemed magnanimous. “Sure, you start with us, and then you go off on your own…” he said, trailing off. Then he’d pulled his glasses down to the bridge of his nose, locking eyes over the top of them and pretending to seethe: “And. Then. I. Kill. You!” He doubled over in laughter.
Driscoll had admitted his mordant sense of humor didn’t always translate. A woman in New Jersey once asked him if Glorious Food might cater a party in her home and he’d replied, dripping mock-condescension he assumed she’d heard: “I’ve only been known to cross the river on occasion.” He sent her a price list, but never heard back. Years later, she was the chairwoman of a Manhattan charity gala that Glorious Food catered, and she asked him: “Do you remember telling me you’d never come out to New Jersey?”
We also found in this reading more than a few lines echoing the weary resignation Donald Bruce White showed reporters toward the end of his career.
“I have two mottos,” Driscoll told us. “Every night is opening night; and, you’re only as good as your last soufflé.” Then he added, “Because if there’s not enough salt in the salad dressing—or too much—there’s nothing I can do the next day except apologize. That’s why everything has to be perfect. Every night.”
* * *
Primarily, our journey into the past solved the riddle of who created the pattern of our nightly tent campaigns and this insane cooking style. But we also gained some new perspective on our earlier question: why endure the hefty price tag that goes with a dinner for fourteen produced in the splendor of the Frick’s Gilded Age mansion, easily $500 per person, and possibly twice that?7 Why not a fancy restaurant instead for the trustees? Because when Donald Bruce White and Jean-Claude Nédélec enabled dining inside the kitchenless museum, it was suddenly possible; and not long after that, someone empowered by the Frick Collection’s board decided that the value of meeting for dinner inside the old pile was priceless. And who’s to say it wasn’t? (We’d later learn that among the board members likely to have attended the dinner that night was the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman,8 chief executive officer of the Blackstone Group; Emily Frick, grand-daughter of Henry Clay Frick; J. Fife Symington IV, a greenhouses and cannabis magnate; plus several other bona fide billionaires besides.) It isn’t that far-fetched to presume that if our team did our jobs making that evening magical, a board member’s heart might swell so large at the majesty of this occasion—the heady blend of wine and sumptuous food, the Gilded Age setting, flowers, and lighting, the proximity to all those Vermeers—that he or she might decide to bequeath an extra ten or twenty million to the collection. Play with billionaires, and the cost of dinner becomes near irrelevant. Just make it perfect.
Control of such an evening, of course, might be paramount—the ability for the Frick event director to nuance these crucial details, while keeping the proceedings on known territory, far from the variables one might find in even the most hushed private restaurant dining room. And yet who was truly at the controls during that night’s dinner? As far as the food the guests were about to ingest, it was just us: an exhausted, frustrated indie rocker, a freelance writer working his first fiesta, and the best proofer in America, Juan Soto.
6
Dinner in Light and Dark
Ted Grows Up as a Party Chef
The call for my first fiesta came in much the same way the call for prep had, with scant notice. One of Juan Soto’s guys texted in sick at the last minute, I jumped at the chance, and thereafter Casey Wilson seemed to reach out to book me often. That fall and winter I worked a dozen or more parties and I looked forward to them: with each one, you stepped into a different world, with a new venue and vibe. Juan and Jorge took me under their wing and, especially at those early fiestas, it seemed like I was in perpetual motion from the moment I set foot in the venue until Juan or Patrick cut me from the clock. If I stood idle for even a second, Juan had some task to fold me into. He and Jorge were great teachers. Since they were kids, they’d worked together for their parents, who sold shoes at street festivals and markets in Mexico; they’d been immersed in a life where you packed things up and moved from one place to another. They showed me how to tape down a room with paper to protect floors and walls, position the proofers according to the site plan, box out the tables and nap them with linens. With every large party I worked, the more the routines of massive, military-grade load-ins became intuitive, and I fell easily into the rhythm of the team. We were a random group of people, but we seemed to compete only to out-support each other with superior anticipatory skills and experience.
Jorge was slighter in build than his older brother, with a more laconic, New Yorkese accent, a great ability to delegate, and with a better command of English than Juan. But he wasn’t as generous with instruction. Juan gamely narrated aloud for me whatever he was doing on the fly, in the sweatiest heat of battle, shouting above the clank of plates and proofer doors. His goal is for each of his charges to become what he calls “chef completo,” a philosophy of catering that applies the same expectations to every individual on the team. Juan’s charges (generically referred to as Sotos1 by everyone on the crew) begin working for him at the rank of manos—“hands,” with the most rudimentary skills—but as soon as you’ve acquired some aptitude, and proven reliable, he wants you to be able to step in for anyone, to perform any role in the kitchen, from sanitation on up to main protein chef, running the hotboxes. Each team member is a complete chef.
Once a kitchen was built and assignments delegated, the focus narrowed to the food torture, and here the tasks tended to be so varied, solutions so on the fly, it could be riveting. Once, plating up 280 yellow beet and burrata salads for a gala, I opened the proofer to find the luminous yellow, jewel-like diced beets, preportioned into small foil cups, had leached a couple of teaspoons of bright yellow liquid into their cups. The contents of each needed to be inverted into the center of the salad plate, and Juan said those beets had to be perfectly dry. There were five sheet pans of these suckers to drain—three hundred cups total—before we could even start plating. I found an empty deli container and began, cup by cup, draining that beet water. Two cups in, I saw Juan nod to a super-young Soto, Pélos.
“My friend,” he said. “Watch me.” Lightning quick, Pélos stretched a triple thickness of paper towels over the top of my sheet pan of cups. He snapped a second sheet pan down over the top, flipped the sandwiched beet cups, and set the contraption upside down on the table. All sixty portions of beets drained into the paper towel, and in a minute or two K.A.s were inverting those cups onto the plates, building the salads. Sheet pan magic!
There were other ways Juan’s chefs completos watched out for amateurs like me. The Wolf of Wall Street premiere was the first giant buffet party I’d worked in the city, with every dish on the menu set out in a large bowl or platter at long tables on the floor. Behind a black curtain were stations, each manned by a K.A., who refilled the empty platters and bowls as the servers returned them, in a constant stream. Being a newbie, I got assigned to the station entailing the least finesse—opening towers of cardboard boxes of four different varietie
s of pizze rustiche brought in from Sullivan Street Bakery. Here’s where I first witnessed how a crowd of six hundred could demolish food so fast that the back of the house had to struggle to keep up. Early in the party, I fanned out the pizza slices, making beautiful, Escheresque tessellations of every platter; an hour later I was tossing them into floppy heaps as fast as I could.
But more astonishing than the gluttony was the condition of the venue, a setting almost too fitting for a film about the seamy underside of extravagance. The party happened to be one of the final events in the Roseland Ballroom, a former ice-skating rink on Fifty-Second Street that had hosted everyone from Madonna to AC/DC to Hillary Clinton (and has since been rebuilt from the ground up as an apartment tower). Our kitchen was erected on a stagelike, raised platform stretching clear across one end of the ballroom. When I first arrived, I’d launched up onto the stage, slung my backpack off my shoulder, and started looking around for the stash of workers’ belongings. An older kitchen assistant I didn’t recognize ripped a clear plastic garbage bag from a large roll and offered it to me.
“No, thanks,” I said. I had no idea what he was suggesting. We typically used these bags for recycling plastic and foil containers.
“Si, si,” he said. “Ratones.” He snapped open the bag, grabbed my backpack, dropped it in, and tied a loose knot in it.
“Ratas y cucarachas en todas partes.” He pointed to a railing, where a dozen similar-looking bags of people’s belongings were tied up, suspended off the floor away from the mice, rats, and roaches. Margot Robbie and Martin Scorsese were in the house that night! Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey and Jonah Hill! And the place was crawling with vermin.
Also that fall, a level of trust developed between me and Patrick as he grew comfortable with my skill set. I made up for my shortcomings by projecting an ever-ready eagerness to learn, and we became friends during our commutes back to Brooklyn. And he showed me the tumultuous range of fiesta styles that catering chefs had to roll with from night to night. After a string of large events I’d worked, Casey emailed, asking me to meet Patrick at 4:45 p.m. at an address on Park Avenue, an ornate building with a coterie of liveried doormen. I waited for him outside the service entrance, marveling at the scale of the buildings and the streets in this part of town, their manicured tree pits rimmed by wrought-iron fences and brimming with winter pansies. But once Patrick arrived with the truck and another K.A., and we’d wheeled the proofer down into the dark, leafless service courtyard, the scene became relentlessly grim. An ancient, yellowing Jacuzzi was tipped on its side like a boat beached at low tide. Around the perimeter of the courtyard, spaced every few yards, were traps for killing extra-large rodents. A snowy-haired gent wearing epaulets and white gloves met us at the back door and escorted us up, his Aqua Velva like a weather system in the narrow, creaky elevator.
And once the service door opened, the color meter flipped again, and we were in the kitchen of a radiant apartment that opened out into further rooms of amber light, laughter, and what appeared to be hundreds of millions of dollars of modern paintings and sculpture. A philanthropist was having a small cocktail reception for a friend. By New York standards, the kitchen was ample, but there was only room enough for us and our half-proofer. (It was the one time I ever used a client’s home oven.)
A man in the kitchen introduced himself as the host’s secretary, requested all the names of the kitchen and service staff, and recorded them in a notepad. I suspected this was a security measure, but he emerged twenty minutes later with a stack of checks. Before I’d assembled my first platter of Diced Lobster, Lemon Mayonnaise, Fresh Dill on Brioche Round, I had a tip for two hundred dollars in my breast pocket.
“Old-school,” Patrick said to me in a hushed tone. “Before 2008, a lot more people rolled like this.”
The hostess’s staff had worked with our crew dozens of times over the years and they chatted as if this were a family reunion—about their various auditions, children, hairstyles changed since the last event. This kind of bonhomie was atypical; that night New York City felt more like a village, if only for a couple of hours. Most private parties this small brought with them an extra level of scrutiny and anxiety.
But by far the most memorable party that first year was a large gala that threatened to jump the shark in its sophistication and theatricality. At $2,000 a head, it was designed to inspire “disorientation and fear” in its 465 lucky guests. Patrick had asked me to come before the prep shift ended to help him pack out, and in the taxi to the venue he filled me in on the particulars. It was the most extravagant party of New York’s fall social season that year and, he believed, the most important of his catering career. But he had legitimate fears that it would be a cringing, career-ending shitshow, despite numerous planning meetings he’d taken with the designer David Monn and his team. Monn, one of New York’s most prominent event designers,2 was calling this party his first-ever performance art piece, evoking “the darkness of the moment before creation.” As we crept across town in the cab, Patrick handed me a copy of the program, a sleek black pamphlet with the words “IN THE VOID” printed in bold block capitals. I opened the cover and read:
We begin life in the ultimate void, a womb … “In the Void” is an artistic expression of inevitable voids we encounter throughout our lives. Dark lonely periods, surrounded both by nurturing forces and the surprises we encounter, as we struggle, work, and evolve toward the light of self-actualization and connection.
“It gets better,” he said. “There’s a six-hundred-foot-long table snaking across the room that represents your umbilical cord. To remind guests of their journey from ‘the ultimate void—the womb!’”
The menu opposite these notes was more grounding than the précis: Frisée Salad, Pecorino, Cipollini Onion, with Bacon Marmalade; Braised Lamb Shank with Winter Greens and Huckleberry Jus; Vanilla Bean Pot de Crème. The three courses seemed straightforward, bordering on safe, to me, but Patrick broke down the daunting and odd logistics he was confronting: the table effectively divided the room in half; so, to find their seats, each couple had to split up at one end of the room and take separate paths, following the umbilical cord for several minutes until they found their place cards, rejoining each other across the divide of the tablecloth. This choreography was guaranteed to inflate the usual fifteen minutes it takes to get chatting guests seated (without taking into account the dining room being nearly pitch-black). As for the waitstaff, the poor souls would be covered head-to-toe in black body stockings, Morph-automatons instructed to march out from the east entrance to the floor—without speaking, without changing stride—drop their plates, and exit at the opposite end of the hall. Patrick had calculated the pickup/drop/pickup round-trip as nearly six minutes, so even with twenty waiters working each side, the first guest would get her lamb shank nearly a half hour before the last—making dining together on warm food and leaving before midnight virtually impossible.
The dark cloud hanging over all catered dinners is simultaneity of service—the expectation that everyone in the room will be served the same thing at about the same time. It’s the unavoidable compromise every catering chef has to embrace, knowing that everyone will most likely not be served at once, but within a twenty-minute window, more or less (ideally less). Guests shouldn’t be put in a position to envy one another any more than they already do, lest mutinies develop. At the very least, those who can see others dining before them become disheartened, and at the worst they cause a ruckus—if word makes it back to the hosts, then caterers may get excluded from the running for next year’s gala. In preproduction meetings with Monn’s team, Patrick had raised the potential doomsday scenarios, trying to get everyone reckoning with reality. For starters: wouldn’t visibility be a problem for the servers? With catsuit-covered eyes, in a hall dark as the womb, wouldn’t they bump into one another? And their mandate to be mute—what if a guest had an allergy or a question? On top of all that, the dessert course was to be served by waiters on C
iti Bikes—imagine the potential accidents there!—followed by a sudden and deafening CRACK!, like thunder and lightning, at the same time a wall of fog two feet high would envelop everyone, along with 180 dancers from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater streaming into the room to perform. This amount of raw stimulus-in-the-dark could not end well.
“This is not a young, hip crowd,” Patrick pointed out. “One of these geezers is going to have a heart attack. I just know it.”
As if on cue, he started punching his own chest with his fist—which I recognized was Patrick’s pneumothorax acting up. After the first couple of parties I worked, I asked how he and Juan Soto projected the utmost chill even in super-stressful situations. Patrick explained: a catering chef quickly learns that an expression of panic is like a drop of blood in the shark tank. As soon as a party planner, or a host, or the people on your crew see you sweat or lose your cool, they start freaking out, and then their coworkers, until the entire system breaks down. He said the only sign he was really stressed was a mild swelling in the lining of his lungs that sent sharp pains through his chest. These shallow thumps he self-administered to his thorax, just beneath the notice of most of his staff, helped ease the pain.