Hotbox

  •  Most commonly rented item in the Party Rental Ltd. product catalog: 10.5-ounce all-purpose stemmed glass.

  •  Cost to Party Rental Ltd. of that glass: Fifty cents.

  •  Price to rent: Eighty-three cents.

  •  Cost of the pink heavy-duty plastic PRL-branded protective crate in which 25 of those glasses are shipped: $75.00.

  •  Average number of glass rentals per year: 3 million.

  •  Quantity of 10.5-ounce glasses in stock at any one time at the Party Rental Ltd. Teterboro, New Jersey, warehouse: 100,000.

  •  Quantity of that glass lost to breakage annually: 100,000.

  * * *

  8

  Sixteen Hundred Deviled Eggs

  Ted Rolls with the Changing of the Guard

  Despite the unlikely, outsize success of “In the Void,” as fall turned to full-on winter, Patrick’s tolerance of the grind was waning. “You have six great events one weekend and you get home to a ton of emails about the next six,” he told me. “No time to reflect, to debrief, to bring the staff in for a toast.”

  Andrew and Valentina’s arrival in Richmond was now imminent and Megan ached to quit the city. And Patrick had become resolute that he’d yet to realize his greatest potential and was ready to move his creative energy to a higher plane. Sonnier’s owners deserved a chef excited by the prospect of designing ten new salads each season that could sit on a table for an hour and a half.

  He wanted to leave honorably, on the best terms with the company that had facilitated him paying off all his student loans and credit card debt, their wedding and honeymoon expenses. So he gave David Castle more than three months’ notice (even though his contract stipulated only sixty days). He said he’d help with the search for his replacement and see the firm through a huge event already on the calendar—the Royal Caribbean launch—which would be his swan song.

  It was almost too poetic. The client was Cornelius “Neal” Gallagher, the chef who had first interviewed him at Sonnier & Castle (“Do you work fast? Do you use both hands?”). When Gallagher left S&C, he’d opened his dream restaurant, Dragonfly, in Manhattan, but he split with the other owners after just two months1 and soon ended up in Florida, where he became director of culinary operations for the Miami-based Royal Caribbean cruise line. Years later, he was throwing a party in New York City to launch nine new restaurants on the ships, a tasting-station event for fourteen hundred guests—the company’s best customers and international travel media. Spread out across the upper floor of a building overlooking the Hudson River on Thirty-Fourth Street would be simulacra of the nine different concepts, each serving a limited tasting menu. Since Gallagher was based in Miami, he needed Sonnier to provide ground support—well, nearly everything.

  Patrick convinced me to work both prep and fiesta on the days leading up to the event, and I’d never seen K.A.s so packed into Pam’s kitchen. Since each of the nine restaurants had a different flavor (Silk served Asian food; Wonderland, the gee-whiz factor, something like molecular gastronomy; Chic was anyone’s guess but menu items included pasta primavera and shrimp cocktail), the tasks were, accordingly, all over the map. I trimmed a dozen pork bellies the size of car hoods for Jamie Oliver’s Italian Kitchen and peeled eight hundred hard-boiled eggs for Michael’s Genuine Pub. The walk-in refrigerator filled, and filled up more, and we got creative, utilizing space we’d never tapped, between the tops of the proofers and the ceiling.

  The day before the event, the out-of-town chefs descended on the prep kitchen to review our work: first Gallagher, then two of the three celebrity chefs whose franchises would grace these boats (Jamie Oliver sent an underling). Patrick pulled Cambros, pots, and sheet pans from the walk-in, and the chefs tasted, seasoned, tasted again. They were generally pleased by the Sonnier team’s work. Oliver’s sous-chef, with sleepy eyes and bed-head hair, a dead ringer for his boss, showed up, tied on an apron, and demonstrated for Patrick how he wanted his porchettas skinned, scored, stuffed with mortadella, and tied. He took a selfie with his handiwork and said, “Sending that one back to Jamie, yeah?!” Then he clapped Patrick on the shoulder and stripped off his apron. “Do the rest just like that, mate. Brilliant!” he said, before skipping out of the kitchen.

  “Did you see that shit?” Patrick asked. “Instagramming so the boss thinks he’s working? Then he just splits like he’s going to pop down to the pub!”

  I just shook my head and kept on peeling.

  “Whatever,” he continued. “Guy smelled like a pub already, I’d rather not have him around.”

  Heading into my third hour of peeling eggs, my fingertips were raw and prickling with pain when two of Gallagher’s top chefs at the cruise line strode in, wearing immaculate pressed white coats with ornate crests and royal-blue piping. There were four of us on the task, peeling our way toward the sixteen hundred deviled eggs the Miami chef Michael Schwartz would serve the following day.

  “My egg team’s on point here!” Patrick stated proudly to the two cruise-ship chefs, but they only glanced quizzically in our direction, then back to Patrick.

  “Ya didn’a use the product that’s already boiled? Already peeled?” the shorter one asked in a rich Scottish brogue. He looked to his colleague, dumbfounded.

  “Sixty quid a pail from Dairyland,” the other chef said. “Two hundred pieces. Saves you a packet of time.”

  The cruise-ship chefs didn’t realize they were dealing with a man who’d taken few shortcuts in his life and on this, his very last fiesta, with nine kitchens and dozens of chefs on task, he sure as hell wasn’t going to make his life any easier.

  On-site that evening, the main catering support kitchen—Kitchen Ten—was a well-oiled machine, its K.A.s supplying matériel swiftly to the nine restaurant stations on the floor. Out of a hydra of an assignment, with so many people to answer to on so many details, Patrick had marshaled an orderly, successful party. And since the visiting chefs hadn’t had to do much other than show up and man their stations, they were ecstatic. (Save one: Devin Alexander, celebrity chef of the TV show The Biggest Loser, was livid that our execution of her “healthy” riff on a McDonald’s Big Mac—a “Little Dev”—didn’t taste quite like the original: the pickles Pam had purchased were all wrong.)

  The sun, which had shone directly in our eyes for most of the event, had finally set, and I noticed Patrick walking among the last guests, looking a little lost as he passed my station. I was ladling out my nine hundredth bowl of clam chowder, but customers were few at that point, so I called out to him and he turned around.

  “How you doing, champ?” I asked.

  There was a pause, as he looked around to confirm no one was near. “I’m getting emotional,” Patrick said, and I wondered for a second if he was going to break down in tears. Back when he’d first told me he’d be giving notice, he feared leaving would be wrenching due to the intense bonds he’d developed with his team members, enduring so many challenges together. “Scar tissue,” he’d called it.

  But no. As in Hawaii, and in Germany, and in Kansas, and in Richmond, he was already looking forward. “I gave up six years of my life to this,” he said. “Now I’m ready for friends. For reading books.”

  At just that moment, I could see Gallagher approaching Patrick from behind, with a bounce in his step. A bit taller than his protégé, he clamped a hand to each shoulder and looked down into Patrick’s eyes. “I owe you,” he said. “Big time.”

  Patrick wasn’t having it. “You don’t owe me anything. You showed me how to do this stuff.”

  Gallagher pressed the point: “No. You took this further than I cared to, further than I was able to, and further than I should have taken it.”

  * * *

  Aside from that one encounter—for all his years of trials and triumphs, nearly two thousand events—Patrick’s departure seemed unceremonious. He was just another morsel of talent consumed by a voracious city. One day, he was everywhere at once in a ten-kitchen slugfest
while I ladled chowder as fast as I could to career cruise-goers and the press (including a magazine publisher I knew well, who looked me square in the face yet didn’t recognize me through my service uniform); the next day, both Patrick and I were at our respective apartments, reading books. He’d disappear into Richmond, and the parties would go on.

  And what did Patrick’s departure mean for me, for us, for “Virginia”? My phone was silent the next day and a couple days after that, too. I didn’t have the relationship with Tyler Johnson that I’d had with Patrick, and it seemed awkward to reach out to him. I guessed Tyler knew I wasn’t totally worthless—at one wedding, when a service captain was in full meltdown because he couldn’t name the four varieties of oyster on the raw bar (the groom was asking), I’d rattled them off like gunfire: Kumamotos, Malpeques, Cotuits, Blue Points. So, during the ensuing month or more of silence, I devoured Rebecca Mead’s epic about the bridal industry, One Perfect Day. Wedding season was coming on, and if Tyler didn’t reach out and bring me on board, I’d call up Robb Garceau at Neuman’s Kitchen or John Karangis at Union Square Events, both of whom had in the last year granted us interviews and allowed us to observe events.

  In June I got an email from Tyler’s new assistant Bethany Morey. Summer season was roaring and I could work any time—prep or fiesta. I stooped to prep to get in his good graces, and I noticed the energy there was markedly sunnier, less edgy. Pam, always quick to smile, seemed almost giddy, and her rapport with Tyler was jovial. She asked if I’d heard any news from our Richmond friends, but that was the only sign Patrick had ever been there. Tyler made some select equipment upgrades—new blades and bowls for the Robot Coupe, new knives, sharpeners, peelers; you no longer had to strap a bag of ice to the motor of the meat slicer to keep it from overheating. When I complimented him on the morale in the room, Tyler let on that until he got his sea legs he’d been gently overstaffing both prep and fiesta, so people weren’t being ground to the bone. He compensated by saving time and money ordering in precut vegetables for stocks and soups, and always taking in account context: for a raucous, late-night after-party, where nobody’s parsing the quality of pulled-pork barbecue, he’d bring in premade “slider filling”; Patrick would have had K.A.s brining and slow-smoking pork shoulders, saucing them with homemade, long-reduced concoctions.

  And Tyler seemed genuinely happy. Sonnier & Castle had rented a carriage house in the Hamptons that had a nice kitchen where he conducted special tastings for VIPs. He, Sonnier’s principals, and their event directors would stay there during weekends with parties on consecutive nights, when it didn’t make sense to travel back to the city. Tyler’s wife had been able to come out a few times, and they’d been to the beach and to tasting rooms at the wineries. The produce at farmers’ markets was phenomenal and he loved being on a first-name basis with his suppliers.

  Tyler also seemed more confident, less brooding than he’d been as Patrick’s sous-chef, which I gather had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t simply inherited the position of executive chef, he’d won it. With Patrick’s help, the suits upstairs had conducted an exhaustive search, summoning a parade of credentialed New York restaurant chefs into the building to cook-audition for them. Tyler’s trial, drawing deeply from his time on the line at Manhattan’s Hearth, turning out simple Mediterranean food that was still elegant and refined, had been everyone’s favorite and in step with the zeitgeist: all the food magazines that year were featuring rustico—plenty of beautiful, vegetable-forward grain salads, served family style.

  It wasn’t just prep that was transformed under Tyler’s leadership: my first fiesta shift that summer had a new vibe that I picked up on soon after I rolled up to Sonnier & Castle to board a van headed to the Hamptons. In front of the building, a few dozen people stood in clusters on the sidewalk, and more loitered up on the loading dock. Vans were parked at the curb, their doors flung open, and I spotted Juan Soto, jet-black hair gelled and swept back along the part, looking more senior than anyone else. He wore an orange knit polo, a Bluetooth headset clipped to his ear, and he gripped a clipboard. He brightened when he saw me. “What’s up, man? I saw you on my list!” he said. “We’re waiting on two missing, but they coming. Five minutes we’re going.”

  Just then his brother Jorge appeared, backpack slung over both shoulders, a floppy rasta man’s knit beret sagging down the back of his neck. “Where you been?” he said, and reached out his fist for a bump.

  But Tyler wasn’t there, which seemed odd. In these moments before liftoff, Patrick had been ever present, micromanaging pack-out to the last possible moment—bossy, if jocular. The Sotos had a sobriquet—“Chucky” (after the doll in the horror movie franchise that turns into a serial killer when provoked)—for Patrick’s alter ego, the person he became in those rare instances when he was truly rip-snorting angry. They loved to rib him at times like these, as the lead chefs scanned the menus he’d handed them. “This menu is looooong,” they’d say. “We’ll definitely see Chucky today!” The Soto brothers had catered Patrick and Meg’s wedding a few years back, were almost like family to him, and Patrick had mostly ignored these jabs.

  “Where’s Tyler?” I asked, and they looked at each other with tight smiles.

  “He’s coming later,” Juan said.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “Is everything good between you?”

  “It’s good now,” Jorge said. “It took a while. We had to convince him to trust us, but now we’re good.”

  I didn’t press further—it seemed natural to take time for everyone to adapt to the new world order, and I’d find out soon enough whether Tyler’s riding in a separate car reflected a deeper conflict or a more conventional, professional managerial style. Patrick had indicated that executive catering chefs didn’t typically spend much time on-site at events the way he did—“Gallagher showed up for app serve-out and he’d be gone soon as the first dessert plate dropped.” Perhaps Tyler had reached a level of trust with the Sotos where he felt the freedom to step away.

  In the near term, not having an executive chef in the van made for a freewheeling and fun ride. La Mega 97.9 FM blasted its mix of bachata, salsa, and merengue. On the Long Island Expressway that day there were no accidents, and though it was by no means a fast trip—the mariachi cover of Bruno Mars’s “Just the Way You Are” that was big that summer played no fewer than three times during the journey—it didn’t become a slogging standstill until we got off the highway and onto the two-lane coastal route at the de facto entrance to the Hamptons.

  The box trucks had already arrived when we got to the estate, and loading into the tents went quickly—despite the huge expanse of green lawn from driveway to tent. Someone had thought to rent twenty or thirty sheets of plywood, overlapping them end over end across the grass to make a track so smooth the proofers practically rolled themselves. It was a crystal-clear summer Saturday, with a trace of salt air wafting in on the breeze. I’d Googled the venue address on the ride out and learned the couple who’d loaned their lawn for the gala was in the midst of an acrimonious divorce the New York Post was following minute by minute. But there was no sign of discord in that field, just industriousness in and around the tent.

  I fell in with Jorge, boxing out tables and organizing the coolers. Now that Patrick was gone, Jorge relished showing me the ropes his own way, starting with the basics, and I was grateful for the refresher. In the Hamptons, he said, you had to be extra careful unpacking, checking off every ingredient and quantity, because a re-run here was a different story: you might be able to send a driver to a farm stand or the King Kullen supermarket for an ingredient, but that round-trip could take an hour in traffic, even more the closer you got to dinnertime. He showed me tasks I’d never been assigned before, like cutting a pound of cold butter into perfect triangles and plating them to hold until serve-out; the correct way to wrap bread baskets for warming on top of the proofer.

  The load-in and setup was the smoothest I’d seen. Our passed appetizer st
ations were ready to rock an hour before serve-out. Juan looked out over the gorgeous room-temperature corn soup with its five garnishes, plated and ready for servers to preset, and said, “Chingón.”

  “What?”

  “Chingón,” Juan said. “It means ‘excellent.’” He dragged the word out slowly for effect.

  “But watch,” Jorge said. “When Tyler gets here, it’s gonna get crazy.”

  “You said you were all good with Tyler now.”

  “We’re good,” he said. “I’m just telling you. He gets nervous. And when he gets here, he’ll want changes.”

  I’d never experienced downtime at a fiesta before. Juan and Jorge conferred over a legal pad, putting together the Monday morning food delivery for their day job. I knew they worked for a drop-off shop in the East Village, delivering breakfasts and lunches to offices and studios downtown, but as Juan dialed vendors, Jorge explained that they manage—but don’t own—the shop. They wake up most mornings at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. in the Bronx and with a small team, just a few guys, they do all the purchasing, cooking, and driving, too. They’re the Pam, the Tyler, and the César.

  About twenty minutes before hors d’oeuvre serve-out, Tyler arrived wearing wraparound shades, looking tanned and in good spirits. The rapport between him and the Sotos seemed strong until he learned there was no diced white onion for the soup. Jorge had been checking items off the lists and I was frankly shocked, after Jorge’s lecture about taking care unpacking, that he’d let this slip.

  “How long have you guys been here?” Tyler asked. “If we’d found this out two hours ago, we could’ve done something about it!”

  He also wanted to alter Juan’s plan for the plating line—a task complicated by the black-and-white theme of the party, a tribute to the artist Robert Motherwell—which had VIP tables getting white plates and the hoi polloi black ones. There wasn’t a single extra plate to spare, white or black, which meant that between that, and the choice of proteins, and the silent vegetarian option, they’d basically be composing every plate to order, and Juan and Tyler had different ideas about whose method would result in quicker service.