by Matt Lee
I also knew that underneath his cool demeanor Patrick was warm and earnest, almost to a fault. On one of our subway trips back to Brooklyn, he’d filled me in on how he’d transitioned from cooking in a trattoria in Italy to catering. After the Piemontese idyll assisting Andrew, Patrick returned to the East Coast, to Trinity College, where he was an older student on financial aid, devoted to social justice, hanging out with professors who’d been South African dissidents and lobbying Connecticut legislators on behalf of food banks in Bridgeport. Upon graduation he was awarded a fellowship at Amnesty International in New York and moved to Brooklyn with Megan Fitzroy, whom he’d met at the Hartford brasserie where he grilled thousands of rib eyes and strip steaks to cover tuition bills. She’d been the pastry chef and had caught him stealing a chocolate truffle.
Soon after they’d moved to Brooklyn, Meg—fastidious, disciplined, talented—found a position at a four-star French restaurant. When Patrick’s fellowship ended, he hoped to find a job in advocacy, but in the meantime he needed money for living expenses, so a colleague of Meg’s secured him a meeting with Neal Gallagher, Sonnier & Castle’s executive chef at the time.
Patrick’s interview with Gallagher was extremely short. “Do you work fast?” he asked. “Do you use both your hands?”
Patrick nodded.
“Great. Don’t fuck up,” he replied. “You start tomorrow as a junior chef, $13.50 an hour.”
His first day there, a sous-chef dropped a case of butternut squash next to him and said, “Dice this.” He hadn’t held a knife for a few years, so within an hour he developed a blister, and by the afternoon it had burst, spattering blood all over his cutting board. Nevertheless, within days, Gallagher assigned him to pastry and bumped his pay up to $15 an hour. Once he saw Patrick’s work ethic, Gallagher piled on responsibilities, like programming the kitchen assistant, chef, and driver schedules. Patrick and Meg both kept crazy hours, hauling back to Brooklyn on snowy nights at two o’clock in the morning only to get up and start over again at six. Just eighteen months later, Patrick would replace Gallagher in the top job.
When we arrived at the site, we met up with the Soto brothers’ crew, watching through the massive open loading bay for Angel’s white box truck to appear on Lexington. We were thirty-odd souls in black rubber clogs, puffy parkas with backpacks, jittery as a pail of eels—and I was the only one, besides Patrick, who knew what insanity awaited us. Every minute the truck wasn’t there was a minute of setup time we were losing. Patrick called to Juan, “All right, let’s do assignments. Get everyone close.”
“Ven aquì! Muchachos!” Juan shouted out, and our crew shuffled in tighter.
“This is the most important party you’ll work this fall,” Patrick called out to the team. He ran down the play-by-play, pausing every so often for Juan to finish translating. There’d be three kitchens tonight—the hors d’oeuvres and two mains. Each main kitchen would serve exactly half the room, 235 people: salad, main course, and dessert. He handed the lead chef for each kitchen—Wilmer Rodriguez in hors d’oeuvres, Juan Soto in Main 1, and Jorge Soto in Main 2—their own folders with the kitchen layouts and party grids (the dish descriptions, with notes on ingredients, allergies, and substitutions).
“Marilu!” he shouted. “You’re in H.D., good to have you back. Pélos! Where are you, Pélos? You’re in Main 1!”
Patrick knew he had a reputation in the business as a decent guy to work for. He chalked it up partly to the social-justice training at Trinity, but beyond the bona fides was a bottom-line benefit: being a good guy lowered his labor cost. He knew half a dozen competing shops run by screamers and psychos and believed his being humane resulted in savings: “You’d work for me for two, three dollars less an hour,” he told me, “if the other guy’s an asshole, right?” And since his own end-of-year bonus partly depended upon meeting labor-cost targets, his management style not only saved Sonnier & Castle money—it put more cash in his own pocket.
That didn’t mean he was above a little fearmongering, especially when the stakes were high. Once he’d finished up the assignments, he held up his phone and turned to Juan.
“Make sure they get this,” he said, and then louder, addressing the whole crew: “If I see you touch your phone from now until load-out—I don’t care how long you’ve worked fiesta for me—you’re gone.”
Assigned to Jorge’s kitchen, I was slightly chagrined, partly because Juan’s the better teacher and also because Juan’s kitchen was the one Monn’s team was working out of. Kitchen 1 was Mission Control and I wanted to be there. Over the course of a dozen parties, I’d witnessed some hairy moments—a dolly with hundreds of parfaits in glassware crates toppling over; a mid-gala text to Patrick from the client: If this is S&C’s idea of service, maybe we’re a bad fit. As an employee, I dreaded the disasters, but as a student of catering, I found them just the kind of high drama that can ensue only in off-premise work. I wanted to be there when this careening shitshow of a party plan came crashing down. Fine for someone as well compensated as Monn to dream big and tip at windmills, ignoring the cautions of a practitioner with Patrick’s experience. But for him to do so over the bodies and livelihoods of the servers and catering workers seemed to me to be sadistic. From what I’d learned thus far, “In the Void” looked to be particularly jejune and ill-conceived.
Scattered whistles and applause rang out when Angel’s truck at last clattered into view, backing up ever so carefully into the bay—its piercing beeeep-beeeep-beeeep amplifying as it finally crossed the threshold into the venue. The crew swarmed the tailgate and, in short order, Juan and Patrick were inside the truck, sliding first the giant white coolers and red plastic dry packs to the edge of the box, shouting out the locations written on their labels: “Kitchen 1!” “H.D.!” “Bar 3!” A service captain showed up with a gang of waiters—their limp black body stockings hanging over one shoulder, or tied like scarves around their necks—to collect coolers of ice and plastic crates of bar equipment. From their nervous laughter and banter, I could sense they dreaded their transformation to come.
When it was my turn at the tailgate, Juan spun a tall hotbox around. “Virginia!” he said. “Kitchen 2, right?” He held the cabinet, labeled “Carne—Kit 2—235,” in place at the edge of the lift gate as Patrick rolled a second into position, then lowered hundreds of pounds of food to the ground. Valentìn and I moved 235 portions of lamb shank through the building, seesawing the proofer’s clattering casters over electrical cables, maneuvering around the black-clad lighting crews and Monn’s squad in their party-dresses-with-shouldered-cardigans. Curtains separating the floor from the wings were pulled back in places and I could see silhouettes of figures out on the floor, carrying penlights to find their way around. Hundreds of near-invisible wires hung from above, each strung with white oak leaves, which, illuminated by pinpoint spotlights, appeared like a screen of falling snow, frozen in a moment. In the minimal light reflected by the suspended leaves, I could see that the scrim of leaves traced the undulation of that single, serpentine dinner table Patrick was so concerned about. Whatever it was, it was breathtakingly awesome, and my pulse quickened a beat.
We rolled the hotbox into our kitchen, where prep tables were arranged in three long parallel lines at one end of the room, with narrow aisles in between. Eddie and Marilu were laying down the first-course plates on the tables three across, so the rims of outer plates hung over the edges by an inch or more. We rolled our hotbox down one aisle, careful not to hit any of those cantilevered plates, and parked it at the back of the room with the others.
Jorge Soto had tapped Luis to be his hotbox deputy, so Luis stayed close to the proofers containing the main-course items, shuttling sheet pans of the preportioned lamb shank, spaetzle, and winter greens in their foil cups, spacing them out into zones, like with like. He stacked all 235 dinner plates in a single proofer and fired it up with three or four Sternos to take the chill off. The rest of us fell in on the salad-course coolers, pulling out plasti
c quart containers of pecorino shards and aluminum pans of greens, shouting out their contents as Jorge checked items off the party grid.
Patrick appeared in our kitchen to build the sample plate of the first-course salad. A walkie-talkie hung from his hip pocket, its earpiece coiling up to his cranium, a microphone clipped to his placket. His shoulder clapped his cell phone to his other ear, checking in with somebody—likely sous-chef Tyler, helming an intimate dinner that night at the town house of a star architect in Greenwich Village; or Ryan, a junior chef leading a cocktail reception for 130 in the lobby of a skyscraper in Jersey City. Jorge had set up a station for Patrick, who holstered his phone, then tossed handfuls of frisée and arugula into the bowl. He teased a glob of bacon jam on top, rubbing it around the bowl with bare fingers until it warmed up and slickened the greens.
Patrick layered the leaves on the sample plate just so, a cascade of greens that appeared to have dropped from the very air but took twelve steps to prepare, an organic sculpture about six inches tall: a tangle of frisée; scattering of arugula; three half-moons of shaved Granny Smith; the dressed frisée-arugula mix; two more slices of apple; more undressed arugula; three thin shavings of pecorino over the top. As he laid the elements, his hands gently plumped and primped. He lifted the plate to eye level, stared at it from the side, set it back down, and pulled out an errant stalk of frisée. Then garnishes: a pinch of smoked Maldon salt, a scatter of purplish micro-amaranth, a drizzle of electric-green olive oil. He seemed to be in another world as he belabored this little salad plate amid the motion and chaos, and I recalled that discussing his music career, he professed to prefer recording in the studio to performing live. Pitchfork’s review of his album Cost (7.1 out of 10) had praised the minimal, essential, deliberate character of his music.3
For a second he gazed upward toward the ceiling, as if trying to remember something; overhead, paint peeled precariously in sheets and a few missing panels exposed a snarl of ducts, wires, and insulation. He thumped his chest, tapped the mic on his lapel: “Forty-five minutes ’til H.D. serve-out, Wilmer. Rapido! Copy?”
He turned back to regard his salad hero. “Okay, guys, we have our sample.”
Jorge motioned for all the K.A.s to come take a look. “Hermosa, señor!” he said, a blade of sarcasm in his voice.
“Key here is lift,” Patrick said. “Throw out any slimy arugula leaves. And don’t crush the greens when you drop the apple and pecorino. Lift.”
We set to work on the salad in pairs. First course is almost always a room-temperature dish—it has to be. Because unlike an hors d’oeuvre or buffet, where you can assemble your dishes in groups on platters, continuously, over the duration of service, a plated first course is the same dish served simultaneously. When the dish involves numerous elements, like this overthought salad, it has to be assembled layer by layer, by a team. It requires coordination and mobility—and plenty of real estate.
Standard prep tables are twenty-four inches wide and most first-course plates are nine inches in diameter. You can fit three across and eight down the length—twenty-four per table—if they’re laid down so the outer plates hang a couple of inches off each side, an element of risk that makes the entire enterprise more compact, flexible, and fast. If you have 235 plates to serve, you need room in the kitchen for at least eleven tables with enough space in between for your workers. If there’s room for only a table or two, workarounds exist, like transferring plates as they’re completed to jack-stands, a.k.a. “plate towers”—six-foot-tall, four-sided racks on casters, that will fit a total of 104 plates vertically in three square feet of floor space. A far more risky option is to stack standard prep tables on top of tables, double-deckered, but this latter scenario is beyond dangerous: an errant elbow would take down not only all the plates of the table above, but also those on the table below. Still, I’d seen it done.
Jorge assigned me and Mini the shaved Granny Smith apple slices, and we got in sequence with the pecorino droppers and frisée slickeners. It was repetitive, but there was a certain satisfaction in the exactitude and the continuity, the plates gradually building up in my field of vision. Valentìn and Marilu swept behind the apple crew with huge salad bowls, setting down tufts of dressed salad, the core of the dish. The labor calculus of all of this was extraordinary, eight or ten K.A.s building salads leaf by leaf. Why not a fall soup? All you’d need to garnish would be drops of a finishing oil, maybe a scattering of spiced pumpkin seeds—most of the labor would be concentrated in the prep kitchen at only 10 bucks an hour instead of $25 per for the eight people we had. Maybe this was too extravagant a ticket for guests to encounter a soup? I guess at some point a kitchen has to deliver on the expectations of a $2,000 seat, whatever the labor cost. Still, at this rate, getting 235 hand-crafted salads, with lift, took ten K.A.s more than an hour.
The team had moved on to garnishes—the purple amaranth sprouts and olive oil—when a piercing cackle-shriek of laughter erupted at the far end of the room. Servers streamed in wearing black bodysuits, the goth-Martians gathering in the area where the sanitation crew had set up coffee stations in front of a wall of pink plastic glassware crates. Their form-hugging body stockings left nothing to the imagination, and the entire room—the kitchen assistants, sanit guys, the waiters themselves—erupted in guffawing and whistling, until a service captain, Michael Alge, suddenly appeared on the scene.
“PEOPLE! PEOPLE! I need you to be adults,” he bellowed. “Five minutes ’til the floor opens and I want it quiet!” But even he couldn’t suppress laughter; it was absurd and it took several minutes for the room to settle.
Patrick arrived to check on the first course after peace was restored. He walked down the length of the tables, scanning plates and squatting down every so often to survey the lift.
“What happened here, Jorge?” he asked, picking up two plates that looked flat. “These won’t work, my friend.” He dumped them in a trash barrel and handed the dirty plates to Jorge. “Redo these two and you’re fine. I’ll get Michael to call for the pickup.”
Patrick started toward the doorway, eyes on the ranks of the salad plates, nary a glance toward the zentai. Then he abruptly turned back. “Jorge, I need one of your guys to expo4 Juan’s kitchen,” he said. Jorge surveyed the available talent and nodded toward me. The word “expediter” sounds impressive, but I’d been in this role in a main-course plating line several times before. In a restaurant, an expediter is typically the most senior chef on the premises, standing at the pass adding final garnishes and making sure everything heading to the floor looks the way it should. In a plating line for a catered dinner, where speed is paramount, the expediter typically wipes errant smudges and fingerprints, a position you give your lowest-ranking manos. I didn’t care; it meant I was headed to Kitchen 1, exactly where I wanted to be to observe this party at full tilt.
I caught up with Patrick in the wing and kept pace with him, walking around the perimeter to Main Kitchen 1. When we passed in front of the loading bay, the Party Rental Ltd. box truck was parked outside and a runner was shuffling in from the truck carrying two pink crates full of plates.
“Hey, buddy!” Patrick called out. “Is that my re-run? Dessert plates?”
He grabbed one crate; I grabbed the other.
When we arrived in Juan’s kitchen, a line of tall, sleek, black-clad servers were waiting, a salad in each hand, listening for the captain’s signal. The audience of gala-goers in their black dinner jackets and dresses had been seated without a hiccup. As we headed to the back of the room, I said something in Patrick’s direction to the effect that it all appeared promising to me: the pieces of this catering puzzle seemed to be fitting into place.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said after dropping the crate of plates, thumping his chest, and swallowing hard. “Shit doesn’t hit the road ’til they start picking up the main.”
I watched in silence with Patrick for a few moments as the first salads went out, the Martians silently goos
e-stepping into the hall with their lofty charges. Then I fell in with the kitchen team, sliding plates down the tables to the pickup, where the stream of returning waiters grabbed for another pair and peeled off toward the floor. And once all 235 frisée salads were gone, the crew transformed the room into the main-course plating line, pushing tables to form a large T that extended out from the proofers lined up against the back wall of the room.
“Chilango,”5 Juan Soto called to me. He opened one of the proofers, where the Sternos’ blue flames wobbled beneath sheet pans. The last event we’d worked together, he’d shown me how to preheat a pan so a sheet of plastic wrap pulled across the top shrank on contact with the hot metal rim, sealing the food in a steamy bubble that brought everything to a safe serving temperature. He slid a sheet pan halfway out; beneath its ballooning, steamed-up wrap were the main-course lamb shanks in their preportioned foil cups. He poked an index finger at the tensioned plastic. “You see,” he crowed. “Perfect.”
Juan knew dozens of clever hotbox tricks, fixes, holds, and fakes, and often had to utilize them to solve the prep crew’s mistakes. For this fiesta, they’d packed out the lamb with so much huckleberry jus in each cup that it would have flooded the plate when the K.A.s inverted it. So he and Geronimo had had to strain the 235 portions of almost all their purply-brown gravy. And the pieces of lamb in some cups were thick as loins, so they’d had to pull each one apart into smaller morsels. How could anyone stay ahead of all these details, on deadline, in real time? For Juan, every save, every errant detail remedied, was an energizing point of pride.