Hotbox

  Jorge shot me a look that said, “See? What did I tell you?” But the party went off without a hitch. After Tyler had departed, after the chocolate bread pudding had been served, Juan was filling out the party report every lead chef must complete, recording any mishaps and mistakes to send back to Sonnier & Castle, and he wrote down the checklist:

  Chingón

  Chingón

  Chingón

  That summer, Juan and Jorge’s role in the operation came into focus for me. Sure, they might get reamed for the absence of diced white onion, but they held considerable leverage over the captains of this industry. Within the wildly vacillating, accordion business of catering, they’ve carved out a stabilized niche that allows them to work more or less on their own terms. Each lowly kitchen assistant’s shred of power—as I learned firsthand—lies in being a mercenary, a free agent from one night to the next; you give your availability to the firm, or you withhold it to the extent that you can afford to say “I’m busy” when the chef needs you. The Sotos, through their talents for catering and cultural translation, have amassed an army of mercenaries who show up (or leave) at their command. So they’re not only a staffing agency, but one with world-class leadership built in: Juan and Jorge themselves are always on the front lines, sparking the Sternos and sweating through their beanies, inspiring outsize loyalty in their charges. How many Sotos do you need? With one phone call you can get twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six, sixty-four chefs completos. Often the brothers divide and conquer, serving Cloud Catering and Sonnier & Castle on the same night, or another firm, or none at all, if they feel they’ve been treated poorly.

  And if this is your first peek behind the pipe and drape, if it’s a mystery to you why these two men are so essential to and powerful in this rarefied, luxury-product delivery system, just consider the leverage they have over their employers: they could, if they wished, shut the proofer doors a half hour before dinner service and stage a kitchen walkout, leaving cabinet upon cabinet of raw lamb and cold parsnips with nobody to move it. Since the Sotos are subcontractors, it’s the catering company whose reputation would take the immediate blow and suffer most for the catastrophe. Imagine punting on the main course at a seated dinner for seven hundred that cost guests a couple thousand dollars per ticket! Who breaks that news to the party planner? Who tells the swells: “Please, everybody, stay in your seats—we’ve ordered in pizza!”

  The more I got to know them, the more I saw how adept the Sotos are at playing these power dynamics: it’s why they’ve never accepted a full-time position at any caterer—also why they’ll never have to lead that mutiny. Forthright and fair-minded, they tend to get whatever they need or want on any assignment.

  Later in the fall, Juan invited me to come work their day job, the place he controls from top to bottom. I spent a couple of shifts with them in the East Village, at Cafiero Lussier Event Design, a business that primarily does “drops” to photo shoots, leaving platters of salmon and bowls of grain salads off for self-service. It sounds fairly routine on the surface, but a typical gig involves prepping breakfast items at the basement kitchen on East Second Street, trucking them to a photo studio; then driving back to the studio a few hours later to collect the breakfast items and drop off lunch; then returning later in the day to collect the remains (three round-trips). Jorge bears the brunt of transportation duties and has cultivated, with gratuities—bottles of red wine, most often—a network of doormen, secretaries, and superintendents in the loft buildings of Manhattan’s West Side where the studios cluster, who will do him favors like allowing access to an ice machine or handing over a few rolls of paper towels—thereby saving him a fourth round-trip if something’s left behind or missing. “A bottle of red wine here and there is what? Seven dollars?” he said.

  When I showed up at the catering kitchen, a few steps down from the sidewalk, several half-hotboxes were stacked on either side of the front door, partially blocking one window. Inside, five chefs clad entirely in black—pants, chef jackets, beanies—worked a commercial range at the back of the room and prepped in the foreground on top of other half-proofers. Larger than a pickup truck but smaller than the typical restaurant kitchen, every inch here was utilized, immaculate, organized.

  Juan, with his finely trimmed goatee, wore the same black uniform as his charges, but with shell-top Adidas instead of the usual battered black clogs or working sneaks of a K.A. He put me to work peeling and slicing butternut squashes, parsnips, and turnips into wide tiles, layering them in earthenware ovals for a winter vegetable gratin, and I began to ask him questions at the leisurely pace of prep—except for that first encounter at the Beard House, I’d never been with the Sotos outside of fiesta conditions.

  Juan’s large Samsung rang, and he took the call on speakerphone. A woman at a small catering firm uptown wanted to hire him to run the proofers for hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party for sixty people the next day. He expressed gratitude but was curt, asked if he could call her back in a few minutes. He gave it about thirty seconds, then called back to decline.

  “I’ve learned to say no with this place,” he said. “We show up and it’s never just proofing. We have to fix all the food on-site. They never do what they say before the event.”

  While I broke down ten heads of celery into steep bias cuts for a roasted vegetable medley, I asked him how he managed to keep this catering firm functioning. Here in the East Village, he was the Pam (purchaser and production manager), the head chef (menu designer and quality control), and quite a few of the people upstairs (human resources, operations manager).

  “I don’t even need a dishwasher because here we’re all dishwashers!” he said over his shoulder from the slop sink.

  He explained he makes his life easy by consolidating all his purchasing on just two suppliers, the ones most accommodating—and most expensive. But the cost of ingredients to him is negligible: “The branzino, for example,” he said, pointing toward the fish that was cooking at that moment in his new convection oven. “It may cost me three or four dollars per portion, so the dish we serve may cost twelve dollars total for ingredients and labor. But my bosses sell that for a hundred dollars per person. Whether the fish costs two dollars or four dollars doesn’t make much of a difference.”

  By lunchtime, Jhovany, with whom I’d worked numerous Sonnier & Castle fiestas, had put together a lentil soup with smoky ham trimmings and vegetable odds and ends. I reached for quart-size deli containers for the soup, but Juan corrected me, pulling down broad, white ceramic soup bowls from a rack overhead. The soup was soul-warming, clove-scented, and we all ate standing up, as Juan told stories from the trenches. He praised Neal Gallagher for having brought professional rigor and new methods to Sonnier—Gallagher had been the one to introduce to them the concept of portioning food in disposable foil cups, for plating with speed and consistency, but converting him to the brilliance of the hotbox hadn’t come without a smackdown. When Gallagher arrived at Sonnier, he had recently won a Michelin star for his cooking at the seafood temple Oceana and he strutted around, telling the Sotos he’d show them “how real chefs cook,” mocking them for their proofers and Sternos. At his first large party, a bar mitzvah in Westchester, veal chops for six hundred, Gallagher rented six standing electric ovens for the site at $400 a pop. Fortunately, all the food had been transported in hotboxes, because when the ovens got plugged in—yep, they overloaded the circuitry of the venue’s electrical system. Gallagher was desperate.

  “He’s crying, ‘I need you guys to help me! What do we do?’” Juan said, in an exaggerated fake-sobbing voice. “I don’t know, Neal, do we call 1-800-Sternos?”

  Juan’s tone turned serious, and I could tell he’d told this story before. “I said to him, ‘Get the fuck out of here and watch me save your ass.’”

  And apparently Gallagher never made fun of the proofers, or the Sotos, again.

  Juan said every chef was challenging to work for in different ways. With Patrick, it hadn’t always been e
asy. On more than a few occasions, “Chucky” made an appearance, and Juan had had to take him aside, in the heat of the event, and speak to him the way he spoke to his children: “Come here, little man. Look at me. Tranquilo. Be cool, take a time-out.”

  There were more stories: another time electric ovens went down, and he went to a ninety-nine-cent store and bought eight electric hot plates that saved the day. When a burner that showed up on the truck didn’t work, and he had a huge pot of pasta sauce to reduce for 150 people, he corralled ten Sternos in the bottom of a milk crate, lined it with foil, lashed plastic wrap into ropes, and formed a hammock strong enough to suspend the sauce pot over the flames.

  “Back in Mexico, we were very poor,” he said. “And we’re very used to making do with little, turning one thing into something else. This invention is effortless for us. As long as I have plastic wrap, foil, sheet pans, Sterno, I can get through any situation.”

  That afternoon, I spent a couple of hours breaking down seven slippery baked hams into biscuit-appropriate tiles, for a luncheon party the next day. Juan talked about life, his family, and his larger ambitions. He was nearing forty, and he imagined in the next three years he might return to Mexico City or Guanajuato and start a restaurant there. He has a wife and three children, owns two apartments in the Bronx and property in Mexico. Even so, he likes the idea of opening a restaurant here, something like the taco stand he used to run in Guanajuato. He’s convinced there’s still a culinary gap to fill between Manhattan and the Rio Grande: if only people could taste the authentic flavors and styles of real Mexican tacos …

  At the end of day, he asked me if I was working for Sonnier & Castle the following night, a wedding in Williamsburg. I’d heard through the K.A. grapevine about this one—the first time Sonnier would be catering the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank. Somebody had spent $24 million renovating the place into a glittering event venue. I’d seen pictures of the soaring dome and the old tellers’ booths in the Times, and I wanted to be there.

  “Just come, I’ll put you on the time sheet,” he said. “If anyone asks, just say, ‘Juan Soto hired me.’”

  I may never become a chef completo, but after three years in catering I’d become a “Soto,” and it felt great. I could work a party virtually every night for the rest of my life if I needed to.

  WORKING THE HOTBOX

  After a year watching Juan and Jorge Soto and their top proofers2 in action, it became abundantly clear that we wouldn’t acquire hotbox skills readily in the field. Even at the most organized dinner, the pressure of working against the clock ’til serve-out didn’t abide a moment’s dalliance with the cabinets. And Matt once committed the classic rookie error, cardinal sin of proofing, of shutting the door tight and snuffing out an entire box at the National Basketball Association’s annual brunch at the Javits Center. It could have been years before Juan let us touch a proofer again.

  So we rented one, and the next day a white truck pulled up outside the apartment. We rolled it in through the front door and sized it up. Only lightly used, it showed the usual dings at the corners and scratches across its flanks. The back side was painted Pepto-pink, smudged brown-black at shoulder height, where it had been handled most, with a black Party Rental Ltd. hippopotamus stenciled on the center of the panel. The cabinet was five feet nine inches tall, and a few inches from the top was riveted a stamped metallic bar code, with identifying number A000000000007813. Inside, the box looked lightly used and seemed clean.

  Our pseudoscientific cooking experiments were all failures. We tried searing steaks (not enough heat, or too much in a spot the size of a half-dollar) and reheated containers of leftovers (by the time the center was warmed, the outsides had crisped). Our tests revealed just how little we knew, but now we at least grasped how much foundational knowledge—what foods should be reheated or cooked in it, and what shouldn’t—is required before the cabinet even leaves the prep kitchen. The hotbox was either too hot or too cold for us at any one moment, whether we were dealing with steak, pasta, fish, or a stack of day-old pancakes we were reheating. Home ranges, ovens, and microwaves move food from point A to point B like a motor vehicle; the hotbox is a pogo stick in comparison.

  Hundreds, if not thousands, of days of trial and error, over- and under-cooking, and poking and prodding would be required for us to build up a cumulative feel for this device, the kind of fine-tuned knowledge the Sotos carry in their brains and fingertips. Judging heat without a thermometer, using just the eyes, ears, and touch, a quick pat to the flanks of the box, is one thing; but the element of time is yet another slippery factor in the equation. While you’re shuffling trays in and out, worrying different blobs of protein, starch, cellulose, and water, time is brutally stretched or compacted. Ten minutes can feel like an hour; then the next ten race by in a few seconds, as you’re getting your bearings. (And then the trout is mush.)

  Anita Lo, whose West Village restaurant Annisa charmed diners and critics alike for seventeen years, is one of few restaurant chefs who has also worked extensively in catering and doesn’t begrudge the hotbox—though she vastly prefers the controlled, one-plate-at-a-time environment of restaurant kitchens and is decidedly “not comfortable in the zone.”

  “I still use the hotbox, it’s elemental,” she said. “It’s not unlike a wood-burning oven. In fact, it’s kind of the same thing, just not as romantic—it’s uglier, and the other one has flavor to it.” She added, “Every chef should have these skills, even a non-catering chef.”

  Lo employs proofers every year when she cooks for the No Kid Hungry benefit (she’s a co-chair) and specifies that the nineteen other guest chefs use them as well. A chef who objected one year was supplied with electric ovens; naturally, the circuits blew.

  For experienced and confident chefs like Lo, the mystery factor, the imprecision of the hotbox, is actually part of the appeal. “As far as controlling the temperature, it’s all about placement of Sterno and food, and how many sheet pans are in between. You can bake, you can burn things—it’s fun on some level!”

  We weren’t having fun, exactly, but we were making some progress in understanding the rudiments.

  One detail about the hotbox that surprised us in testing it is that a single can of Sterno is actually quite gentle; to reach searing or baking temperatures, you need five or more canisters on at least two sheet pans. One Sterno generated a plume 260 degrees Fahrenheit (well above boiling) measured an inch above the flame, but after half an hour that single can had raised the temperature of an empty sheet pan placed eight inches above it to only 100 degrees—bath temperature—from 75. Aluminum—the material many sheet pans and the hotbox itself are made of—is extremely conductive, and spreads out that locus of energy far and wide until it dissipates. We knew enough to crack the door to supply oxygen to the flames but wondered why Cres Cor hadn’t invented a graduated clasp that allowed the door to be propped open at fixed gaps? In any case, we hacked it the way we’d seen Juan do it, fashioning a stay from a “rope” of aluminum foil.

  The most important lessons that this hotbox taught us, however, were when we called Jim McManus at Party Rental Ltd., offered up the bar code, and asked him to run a spreadsheet on every location our proofer had traveled in the prior year. Before he (somewhat reluctantly) sent us the provenance of our cabinet, he challenged himself and guessed fifty total sites, noting that Party Rental owned at that moment 497 hotboxes to serve about fifty thousand events per year from D.C. to Boston. When the spreadsheet came in, the total number of sites this hotbox had logged that year was forty-four, entirely in the New York and New Jersey area. It sounded like a modest number, less than one per week, but that didn’t account for times it might have remained in one caterer’s custody across multiple events. Still the list was about the most effective overview of a year in high-end catering we’d ever seen.

  We did some calculations and figured out that the hotbox we rented had traveled at least 992 miles (again, not counting trips taken if a caterer kep
t it on board for multiple events) in 2016. The average round-trip for a gig—from Party Rental’s warehouse in Teterboro, New Jersey, to the site and back—was 23 miles.

  The locations the hotbox had rolled into included most of the larger, grander venues, from the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the New York Public Library, to the IAC (InterActiveCorp, Frank Gehry’s dramatic glass-clad building on the West Side Highway) to One World Trade Center. It had been to Lincoln Center more times than anyplace else, to a hospital in New Jersey, and to a Restoration Hardware in Manhattan; to the Lyric Theatre, to Facebook’s New York headquarters, and to Ellis Island.

  The list of caterers who had taken custody of the hotbox included all of the familiar firms at the upper end: Great Performances, Glorious Food, Pinch Food Design, Sonnier & Castle, Union Square Events, Abigail Kirsch, Restaurant Associates (which accounted for eight gigs), and a couple of caterers with headquarters deep in the suburbs, grabbing some gold by working an event in the big city.

  The clients who tasted food from this box before us included many among the S&P 100 corporations—IBM, Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg, Tiffany & Co., American Express—as well as an array of cultural institutions, including the Public Theater, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Bowdoin College, Mount Sinai Hospital, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the National Kidney Foundation. There were a few not-quite outliers, such as the food magazine Bon Appetit and the Dalton School (a private grade school, crucible of S&P 100 CEOs). And our proofer made it to exactly one wedding that year.

  * * *

  9