Hotbox

by Matt Lee

  “Donde micros?” he asked after a while. He’d mapped out the plating line and assigned me microgreens—garnish. No surprise there; I was still “manos” to him. I fetched two small plastic clamshells of arugula sprouts from the cooler and set them at the end of the line closest to the entrance to the floor. He scrawled in black permanent Sharpie directly on Party Rental Ltd.’s tablecloth everyone’s name and their “drop,” starting closest to the proofer and moving down the line: Sergio/Spatz; Pelos/Carne; Roxy/Verduras; Dutch/Salsa; Virginia/Micros. He marked up the opposite side of the long table and all ten of us fell into our positions.

  The black catsuits began filing back into the kitchen, dropping dirty, mostly empty salad plates at the sanit station—a sign we were near go time for the main course. Dutch tightened down the valve on his German funnel—the finest of catering tools,6 an ingenious conical “sauce gun” with a spring-loaded valve for drip-free pouring with a trigger thumb. Across the table, Marilu folded paper towels into plate wipes, dipping them into a container of water, and passed me a stack. Juan reached into his proofers to retrieve a clean plate and three foil cups and began building the sample: spaetzle first; lamb shank jauntily on top and to the side; winter greens in the crook. A squirt of sauce from the funnel made a gentle arc over the top. I sent a few pinches of microgreens down the line and Juan plucked a pinch for his garnish and popped the rest in his mouth. He walked the plate down the line so we could all inspect it and dropped it at the pickup just as Patrick appeared.

  “Bueno, my friend,” was Patrick’s judgment.

  A service captain nicknamed Panda herded his troops into a single-file line down the hall from the pickup and passed out black napkins to protect their hands from the lava-hot china.

  Geronimo hoisted a stack of plates out of the proofer and clanged them down at the top of the line. And then everything happened fast. Patrick said, “Go!” and Geronimo and Juan passed sheet pans full of food down the line. All heads bowed. Sergio picked up the first plate, inverted his foil cup of spaetzle, nudged it to his left, reached for another. Patrick got into position at the top of the “T” to watch the first plates come off the line.

  “Lighter on the garnish,” he said.

  Only about five plates had gone out when we heard a shout—“Shit!”—followed by a deafening crash. Two plates of the main course had smashed to the floor at Patrick’s feet.

  Everyone froze, focused on a waiter whose face we couldn’t even see.

  “Plates are too hot!” the waiter squealed.

  “Did you double up the napkin?” Panda shot back at him. A sanit guy had already swooped in to clean up the wreckage.

  “Nothing to see here,” Patrick said. “Keep the line moving, people.”

  “Make sure your linens are doubled up before you pick up, please!” Panda shouted.

  The assembly line started up again and kept moving, twenty more plates or so, until Patrick shouted, “Stop!” There were no morphs to pick up plates, and about a dozen main courses partially assembled on the line. Patrick looked down the hall, looking for servers, and pinched his mic. “Chef to Michael. Your servers need to be sprinting back here, okay? Food’s not getting any warmer.”

  A minute or two more ticked down, and then a gaggle of morphs appeared in the distance. Patrick shouted down the hall. “Pick up, please! You guys need to get back here faster!”

  More waiters appeared and our plating line lurched back to life.

  Patrick looked at me, said sotto voce, “If they start returning plates to be rewarmed we’re fucked.”

  As if on cue, one of the party planner’s associates, a willowy blonde with an English accent, called from the threshold of the kitchen door, “Chef! We’ve had complaints of lukewarm food!”

  Patrick thumped his chest. “On it!” he shouted back.

  A few minutes passed, and she stepped back through the door again. Our line had paused again, waiting for servers. The British woman called out, “Chef, can we please hurry this along?”

  “Speeding up!” he replied, then tapped the mic on his lapel: “Chef to Michael. Your waiters need to run. FASTER!”

  * * *

  Moments like this, as I sprinkle sprouts, I return to a nagging question: what kind of person chooses this as a nightly drill? Why not work in a restaurant, where the challenges are in a barrel for the shooting? Sure there’s a ticket printer spitting out orders, slamming a line for a time, but at least the pressure to deliver food gets spread out over a bell curve each night rather than a few hair-raising, all-or-nothing spikes. As I got to know Patrick better, I sifted his background for possible answers. His father was in army logistics and quite the martinet; before Patrick was fourteen years old, they’d moved twenty-three times—to places as different as Hawaii, Germany, and Kansas. But he claimed that hadn’t fazed him.

  “I loved the idea of reinventing myself,” he’d told me in an off-duty interview. “By the time I’d made close friends, I found myself in some sort of trouble and it was time to move on.” And he noted his early exposure to a withering form of discipline might be why he stayed sure-footed amid the chaos of high-end catering.

  He was keenly aware of the wages of the itinerant life. By Patrick’s junior year of high school, his family had seemed to finally land somewhere permanent, in a D.C. suburb in Virginia. His three older siblings graduated and gone, Patrick and his mother began unpacking, but within a few months his father announced he’d been denied promotion to general by the army, and he departed the following day for a United Nations posting in Cambodia. At first, the commander communicated sporadically, then never. One day Patrick was mowing the lawn, listening to the Melvins on his Discman, when a Jeep with a “UN” logo on the door, driven by a guy in a blue helmet, pulled up. His father got out of the passenger side, gave him a cursory wave, and walked inside the house. Patrick continued mowing until his father emerged, walked back to the Jeep, and with a single word, “Good-bye,” left his son’s life for two decades. His mother told him they had four days to pack up the house. She left for California to live with a sister there for a stretch, and Patrick moved in with a friend’s family and threw himself into making music. He’d started a band, Plush Velour; they had a killer light show and were playing regularly, opening for his heroes Slobber Jaw and Pope Joan.

  Numerous times I’d seen Patrick make the best of a situation that might easily crush someone lacking his drive and resilience. As much as he could get frustrated, infuriated even, by catering, he also professed to having big ideas for the industry’s future. He’d met a software developer about an app that centralized chef, waiter, and kitchen assistant bookings and leveraged social media to incentivize worker performance and team building. But there was another dream in play, too, as the intermittently flailing plating line of “In the Void” threatened to derail his career. He’d confessed that he and Megan had a yen to quit New York City entirely, to settle down and start a family. Andrew had by now married an Italian woman, Valentina Giordano, and they planned to move to Richmond in the coming summer to raise their child. Patrick and Meg had a dream of partnering with them on a restaurant—a warm, glowing, modern room in an old brick building.

  “Chef, we need special meals now!” It was the British woman again, like a bullhorn. “Twenty-two vegetarian!”

  Patrick looked to Juan.

  “I got you, Papi. Tranquìlo.” Juan had set up a couple of proofers’ worth of the silent vegetarian option, Acorn Squash with Moroccan Vegetables, Spiced Tofu, and Israeli Couscous, plated, ready for its pinch of sprouts and squirt of apricot sauce.

  And in the meantime, the waiters in their black Lycra had found their stride. Patrick cajoled our plating line to a faster rhythm. He needed the guests to love this food and this party so when the gala board met for their postmortem, they’d sign on with Monn for next year, and Monn, if things went right, would book Sonnier & Castle.

  Despite the evening’s numerous risks and absurdities, at the end of the night P
atrick’s team had, in his own parlance, crushed it. No mutiny had broken out, no bicycle accidents, no heart attacks—no guest had suffered an indignity worse than lukewarm lamb. By 10:30 p.m., Patrick dismissed most of his crew, and only he, Juan, and I remained to serve dinner for Monn and his team. They were loudly delirious with happiness, even the Brit. Everything had been brilliant: food, music, dancers, the harpist on the platform spun around the room by dancers, the Citi Bikes, the CRACK of lightning, the fog machine. And when the room settled, Monn called Patrick over to talk with him privately. He told him they’d reached a new height together. Monn had pushed himself to become the artist he always knew he could be, and he was grateful to have a chef who understood and could execute his vision. New meetings were already in the works. There was plenty more business to come.

  But by 11:30 p.m., with only a handful of union electricians and Sonnier & Castle’s three-man sanitation crew left in the building, Patrick and I were still there, checking the numbers and condition of the hotboxes, the coolers, the dry packs of utensils, towels and aprons, making sure everything would make it back to the prep kitchen. Two large plastic lugs the ice arrived in had gone missing. Party Rental Ltd. would be collecting its stuff first thing in the morning.

  I’d heard that most executive chefs leave parties as soon as the last main-course plate hits the table, but Patrick wasn’t that guy. Still, it seemed that any sane person might weigh the value of a couple of plastic containers against a food and beverage budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars (which on that successful night would yield hundreds of thousands more) and have left those lugs behind for the angels. Nearing midnight, the heavy black curtains came down, revealing the snaking table taken apart, in pieces stacked on the floor. The chairs were in neat towers in a corner. And Patrick finally found the lugs. So we left.

  * * *

  By the numbers, “In the Void” was an enormous success. Media coverage and word of mouth were unprecedented for the charity, and Monn got contracted to do the gala the next year. He rebooked Sonnier to do the food the following October for a guest count that had nearly doubled, to 785, on the success of “In the Void.”

  But as it happened, by then Patrick and Meg had already been in Richmond for a few months, focused on their restaurant dream, and with a child on the way.

  SHEET PAN MAGIC

  The term, used since the 1980s, refers to the art of improvisation in the catering business. Here are a few of the classics used in the heat of battle.

  Forgot a strainer?

  Poke a bunch of holes in the bottom of an aluminum foil pan with a skewer or a ball-point pen.

  Forgot the whisk?

  Flatten a foil pan lid. Roll it up lengthwise into a dowel shape. Cut strips in one end with a chef’s knife or kitchen scissors. Splay ends slightly.

  No foil? Head to coat check and grab two metal coat hangers and reshape into something resembling a whisk.

  Forgot a flour sifter? Or a shaker for confectioners’ sugar?

  Find a wicker bread basket or a basket from a floral display.

  Pots and pans already packed on the truck and you need to cook a parting snack for the host?

  Place a sheet pan directly over the lit Sterno for searing or reheating, and cover the food with an upturned mixing bowl or sheet of plastic wrap.

  No rope or string?

  Scrunch and twist plastic wrap, of the length you need. It’s even flame resistant after an initial shrink.

  No refrigerator?

  The bottom shelves of a hotbox, with a sheet pan of crushed ice or dry ice placed just above the food, will keep very cold, even with warm zones operating above, in the same box.

  No honing steel?

  Run the edge of the knife briskly along the handle edge of a metal serving spoon or ladle.

  Meat slicer overheating?

  Drape two plastic bags filled with ice and tied together over each side of the slicer’s motor.

  * * *

  7

  The Big Pink Hippo

  Taking the Measure of Event Rentals’ Category Killer

  Long after the conversation dies and the valiant caterers have gone home, there’s a final act that truly signifies the party is over. A truck pulls up at the site in the middle of the night (or the next morning) to haul away the borrowed tables and chairs, dirty plates and linens, glasses and other hardware that helped transform an empty space into something resembling a restaurant. You’ve seen a truck like this, even if it escaped your notice. Those who live anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, between Portland, Maine, and Virginia Beach (and back a good two hundred miles inland from the coast), may in fact be familiar with this specific truck because the category killer in party rentals in that region is represented by a large cartoon hippopotamus a shade lighter than Pepto-Bismol. Written alongside the hippo is PARTY RENTAL LTD., an anodyne name that doesn’t even begin to reveal the encyclopedic range of things you can have dropped on your doorstep tomorrow. Need a cotton candy machine? How about white leather lounge seating for 250 people? A commercial refrigerator? Four—or four thousand—gilt forks? A fifty-foot extension cord, a coatrack, a FryDaddy? It’s got tablecloths and tables, platters and plates, in a riot of styles and colors, one hundred or more of each pattern.

  Party Rental Ltd. has built its lending business to serve virtually everyone. For a generalist in such a giant business, there’s no approaching this halfway or even three-quarters: your stash of stuff has to be the Mount Everest of inventories, an old-school Amazon; you have to offer every damn thing a client would need—except tents, it doesn’t rent tents—in every possible color and quantity, deliverable in one order. Human nature favors single sources for the boring necessities like chairs, trash cans, and plates; there isn’t a party planner in the world who would prefer to make four phone calls, place four orders, if they could get it all affordably with one. Party Rental Ltd. is the leader in rentals in its lucrative chosen region, and has by its massive scale—built up steadily since 1972—prevented any meaningful competition. To re-create its inventory would require a capital investment too large to contemplate.

  Another secret to its success is being warm and cuddly to clients—accommodating and personable, and permissive, willing to work with ridiculously last-minute orders and to overlook a lost ice lug or two. Customers spending $250,000 and up in a year represent 80 percent of its business, but Party Rental Ltd. is nevertheless more than happy to deliver to you, too, any of the more than ninety thousand separate SKUs (stock-keeping units) in its catalog. All it takes to rent from the company is to meet the minimum order of $325 and to pay the delivery-and-pickup fee—a flat $100 surcharge to most locations in the ten states serviced. To give you an idea of how much $325 represents in rental terms, let’s create an imaginary event: you’re cooking a special supper at home for a friend’s fortieth birthday. There will be sixteen diners (including you) and it’s a cocktail reception and dinner, with some easy hors d’oeuvres you’ve prepared, and four courses—a first course, a main course, a salad, and dessert. You’re serving sparkling wine with the hors d’oeuvres and there will be a choice of red and white wine on the tables, and water. For $394.06, you’ll have almost everything you need save the food and drink: two round tables for eight plus the tablecloths and matching overlay, all the chairs, the cloth napkins, the plates, the flatware, stemware (four glasses per person, including champagne flute, water glass, and two wineglasses), and the paper cocktail napkins for the canapés you’re serving during the first hour. And the champagne chiller, of course!

  A total of $494.06 ($30.88 per person) gets you a lot of material hauled to your door, clean and ready for party time, and then picked up the next day. And if that sounds pricey for rentals—it’s not nothing, after all, and you don’t get to keep any of it (except any unused paper napkins)—bear in mind that the fact that you don’t means you also weren’t obligated to store it, either. And there’s this: you don’t need to clean any of it! You don
’t even have to scrape the plates—although the drivers who pick up the rentals the day after your dinner (not to mention the warehouse team that receives those food-slickened plates) would very likely appreciate it.

  * * *

  “You talk about a dirty job?” Jim McManus bellowed, as he ushered us across the noisy receiving floor of PRL’s 275,000-square-foot warehouse in Teterboro, New Jersey—the company headquarters and the largest of the company’s five warehouses from D.C. to New England. It was late May 2016, spring gala season was mostly over, but as he waved his arm languidly across ten loading bays, half a dozen trucks were backed up, feasted upon by forklifts and warehouse workers, unloading the last of the previous day’s parties, pushing battered proofers and rolling round tables into the warehouse. “Everything needs to be cleaned. Everything,” he continued. “And you should see the caked-on dirty dishes—the shit!—that our people have to deal with, day after day. We clean it, pack it, count it, wrap it—those dishes gotta be ready to go again for tomorrow.”

  McManus would be a shoo-in to play Santa Claus at the mall, but today he’s playing the role of salty warehouse guide and rentals ambassador, wearing a voluminous pink gingham shirt over his Falstaffian frame. His thirty-year career as a rentals salesman—eighteen of those with Party Rental Ltd.—has revealed to him the full contours, and every nook and cranny, of this invisible business. Moreover, as someone playing a supporting role to every caterer’s daily grind, and with an essential monopoly on party rentals in this part of the country, McManus knows virtually everything about everyone who caters. By processing their orders, he’s privy to caterers’ income and expenses. He knows who your clients are, and who your competitors’ clients are. And that’s just from the data in his phone; his gossip networks are unparalleled.