Hotbox

Can I Even Eat This?

  Food Design at the Cutting Edge

  SCENE: Cocktail hour, at a party. POV: Guest at the event.

  A server walks into the room carrying in an upturned palm a platter of canapés. He proffers them to small clusters of guests, murmuring his script discreetly—“Cheese croustade,” or “Mortadella toast?”—enticing the guests to reach for a bite. (Or not.)

  Stop the film. Rewind. Now imagine that scene again, but this time the server emerges carrying not a platter, but a parasol, which he’s twirling lazily, almost imperceptibly. As he walks toward you, you notice from the tip of each rib of the parasol hangs a length of pink string ending in a small gold S-hook. And from each hook hangs a shard of … something. It’s reddish brown, faintly transparent, looks a bit like a piece of stained glass.

  “Candied bacon?” he asks.

  Conversation stops and the people around you gasp. You and a few others reach for the bacon and … wow. It’s perfectly crisp, just enough chew, smoky-sweet. Yum.

  “Sorry, I don’t eat meat,” a member of your circle tells the waiter.

  The server says, “Helga will be popping up momentarily with a raw-bar selection,” and moves on, in his merry way.

  Licking the sticky bacon residue from your fingers, you turn to see Helga, pushing what looks to be the love child of a wheelbarrow and a unicycle. It’s a mobile raw bar. In the wheelbarrow’s tray, oysters and clams on the half shell are set on a bed of shaved ice, and in between the bivalves are several whole lemons with finger-pump nozzles jutting out their top ends.

  “North Fork clams and oysters with lemon mist?” Helga asks.

  You reach for a clam and a lemon, and pump atomized juice over the clam, then slurp down this cold, briny, tart bite—the flavor of a perfect day at the beach.

  “You’ll find further selections on the interactions at the far corners of the room,” she says.

  “Interactions?” you ask.

  “Yes, over in the corner, against the wall.”

  You set off to the corner of the room, but find yourself looking at … a blank white wall. But wait. On closer inspection, there are knobs and drawer pulls scattered, apparently at random, throughout that wall. A waiter appears at your elbow. “Go ahead,” he says. “Pull on any of them.” You pull one, and out rolls a cabinet of sorts, only six inches wide, but four feet tall, and open at the sides. Suspended from horizontal rods that stretch all the way back into the wall and out of sight are square-shaped mini-flatbreads the size of a pack of cigarettes, and by the coloring on each piece of flatbread, each rod appears to hold a different flavor. A friend next to you pulls another knob on the wall, and out comes a broad horizontal tray, like a desk drawer, that’s full of spiced mixed nuts. And so it goes. In another corner of the room is a narrow shelving system holding ranks and ranks of clipboards suspended at a 30-degree angle. Pick up the clipboard and it becomes the tray for the flat array of charcuterie and cheese it holds, the print on the paper underneath detailing what you’re about to put in our mouth. By the time dessert emerges—white platters of mini chocolate-ganache-filled meringues floating through the room suspended by white balloons—you may feel you’ve gone wholly through the looking glass.

  But in fact you’re simply at a party catered by Pinch Food Design, the brainchild of Bob Spiegel, a forty-year catering veteran who cut his teeth in the early eighties at Glorious Food, and T. J. Girard, a production designer, who eight years ago teamed up with Spiegel to take what passed for novelties in catering circa 2010—the oyster “shooters,” the smoked salmon “lollipops,” the mini lobster rolls—and blast them into the twilight zone. Almost overnight, Pinch became the undisputed industry leader in “wow-factor,” design-driven catering. (Pure coincidence? Instagram was launched the same year they opened their doors.)

  Pinch headquarters is a lofty, fishbowl-like storefront appropriately situated in the art gallery district at the northern edge of Chelsea. Look at a Pinch canapé—a charred square of steak pierced onto the tapering point of a custom-fabricated stainless-steel spoon skewer, a puddle of electric green in the spoon’s narrow bowl—and it wouldn’t seem out of place mounted on a pedestal in any of the neighborhood’s galleries. Spiegel paints beautiful, drippy abstractions—his medium? scallop seviche—on tables the size of a bedsheet that make you think: Can I even eat this?

  Spiegel and Girard have created their own catering language. The surfaces they create for presenting food, whether a sleek, freestanding shelving unit with slender birch-tree columns or the spike-covered Bakelite tray for serving doughnuts are “food furniture.” An “interaction” is Pinch’s term for what most people would call a buffet station, which at first seems a little silly. But when you think about it, even a stationary presentation of a piece of food at a Pinch party—the charcuterie clipboards, say—insists that the guest engage with it in a manner more conscious and knowing than absentmindedly picking up that second sodden tomato bruschetta. You have to be present with the food at a Pinch party; you must meet it halfway. It’s self-conscious, it announces itself: Look at me! In their parlance, a “pop-up” is a mobile interaction—the raw bar, the parasol—that comes to you where you are and practically compels you to contend with it.

  Spiegel and Girard draw as equally from the design and fashion worlds as they do from art. They refer to their “collections,” themed around an idea (drawers and rolling cabinets, pulled from a wall, say) and they present new collections every season at an event they call “The Peep Show,” attended by party planners, their best corporate and social clients, and the food media. When prospective clients come in for a tasting, meeting around the conference table in a room that displays their latest food furniture, they’re presented not only with food but with “lookbooks,” like you’d see at a fashion house.

  Detractors call Pinch’s work gimmicky. “I might use them for a wacky bar mitzvah,” one event designer told us, “but I can’t think of anything else.” For their part, Spiegel and Girard understand that they’re not for everyone, or for every party. Their brand is innovative food (and beverages, of course; their bar division, with an assortment of odd machines that make booze luges and funnelators seem staid, is called Twist), and they get that not everyone is looking for Alice in Wonderland.

  “If a client comes to us and wants their own specific, custom thing, we’re probably not the caterer for them,” Spiegel told us.

  “You can go to a tailor and have a custom suit made, or you can go buy an Armani suit—that’s how I describe what we do,” Girard added. “Are we capable of making you a custom station? Yes, but the time and energy we spent making our Pinch collection is a far greater amount of attention.”

  Spiegel put it slightly differently: “When you go to Per Se, do you ask them to make your grandmother’s kugel? Or do you order off the menu?”

  Fortunately for Pinch, enough brands and brides do want photo-ready food. They’re the go-to caterer for any business looking to have their event blow up on social media, and that happens to include a lot of companies in fashion, tech, and entertainment, and charities who want to sex up their mission.

  “A lot of our clients are corporate, they’re using marketing dollars for their parties, and they want to know what’s the return on their investment?” Girard said. “Food isn’t just: let’s make sure to keep them from being hungry, and drinks aren’t just: these people need a cocktail. It’s: how do we make that cocktail a part of that party.”

  “You want that guest to wake up the next day, like … pinch me, did I dream that?” Spiegel added. “And because of the creativity we showed, those guests donate money to the charity, or invest in that company.”

  Pinch is the rare breed, almost one of a kind among the top tier of caterers in New York, because it has prioritized design. Everything else comes next. For the vast majority of catering chefs, however, the design of a food item is tertiary at best, determined after flavor, texture, budget, and logistics are figured out. What’s the cost
of the branzino fillet and how much labor’s required to prepare it? Do I have enough space for tables and hotboxes to cook this entrée for the number of guests? Will this hors d’oeuvre be crisp or soggy?

  Since prep-kitchen labor is less than half as expensive as fiesta labor, dishes that can be fully cooked in the prep kitchen and simply reheated and garnished on-site will always be winners on the balance sheet compared to items that require more labor and assembly to build at the party. So canapés like pigs in blankets, the little triangular phyllo-dough pies called beggars’ purses, and Chinese-style spring rolls, that a single chef running a hotbox can fire up all at once, will always be the executive catering chef’s heroes. By contrast, Sunny-side Quail Egg with Tomato and Asparagus on Brioche (from chapter 1), which requires at least two if not three on-site wage earners to serve out, will give your chief financial officer palpitations (even if its brilliance helped impress the client at the tasting). Balancing more economical options with ambitious ones and avoiding the impression of being all over the map—Pig in a blanket? Meet tuna-tartare taco bite!—is key for a conscientious chef. By the same token, main courses like short ribs and lamb shanks, slow-cooked meats that become more tender and unctuous the longer they hold, which can be cooked through in the prep kitchen, then simply reheated, will be perennial. Garnish it with something green and let it go!

  Catered food often comes with such indifferent design and low expectations because of the economic and logistical pressure, which leads chefs to congregate around the same safe dishes. If you’ve been to a lot of seated dinners, you almost know the textures and flavors you’re about to eat before you arrive at the venue. But it’s also why it’s relatively easy for a caterer to make a splash by doing something remarkably different.

  A revealing case study in the competing demands of food design, labor, and cost was a first course witnessed across two years of the same benefit gala. Same catering firm, two different chefs. The first year was Patrick Phelan’s first time doing this particular event. At the tasting, the board had chosen a new salad he was quite proud of and, in classic Patrick style, was so complicated to assemble that it required fourteen K.A.s (the cheapest of whom were costing Sonnier & Castle $25 an hour) nearly two on-site hours to accomplish at the event venue. After the course was cleared, it was faintly demoralizing to see how many came back to the kitchen nearly full, only picked over. We had tasted it and thought it was delicious—even if the frisée was a tad twiggy and it could have used a shade more dressing.

  The following year, Patrick had moved to Richmond and it was Tyler Johnson’s turn to perform at this gala. Perhaps the party planner didn’t trust Tyler yet, but for some reason he insisted upon a first course of his own devising, a custom recipe that required virtually no on-site execution: a “pumpkin hash” served in a hollowed-out ghost pumpkin. Tyler howled privately at how retro—and not cool retro—it seemed, adding, “It’s way too rich, and the portion is way too big!” But his bosses knew it was on the party planner if it flopped, that the fallout wouldn’t affect him. And from a cost-labor perspective, it couldn’t be better. Sergio had whipped up a few tilt skillets’ worth of the hash—precut pumpkin, onions, butter, and seasonings—in an afternoon. The ghost pumpkin vessels had come in from the produce supplier pre-scooped, with the tops off. Tyler had a couple of K.A.s fill the 750 pumpkins with hash and arrange them on speed racks. They were served at room temperature, so the only finish labor performed on-site was one K.A. in each kitchen sprinkling chives and parsley over the top and another who put the lids on. And they went out to the floor.

  Tyler watched the first-course plates come back to sanitation and said quietly, “Holy … shit.” Seven out of ten of these pumpkins were scraped clean! People loved the giant pumpkin. Whatever you might think of a hash in a hollowed-out pumpkin, you can’t argue with inexpensive-to-prepare, crowd-pleasing food. The proof was in the empty plates.

  A skillfully built salad is just a salad. A ghost pumpkin hash makes more of an impression, so much the better if it actually is delicious. And this is where complicated design in food can get a chef into shaky territory—and it’s why there’s so much pressure on the food at a Pinch party to taste great. Because the more attention a chef brings to design and gesture, the presentation and form, the more he or she raises expectations about the performance in the mouth. Eye candy has to taste good. There’s a lot of conceptual distance between a hollowed-out pumpkin and beignets that pop out of holes in a wall, and there are plenty of places for chefs to get tripped up in between.

  Imagine you’re at a seated dinner, for example, and a small jewel-like piece of sashimi is placed before you, beneath a glass cloche. You may ask yourself: what’s under there? It looks like a piece of sashimi in a terrarium, but because of its presentation—under glass!—you prepare for some sort of sensual payoff when the bell jar gets lifted. You’re looking for that ta-da! moment, so when the waiters arrive in teams, removing the cloches simultaneously, you lean in close to discern—was there an aroma trapped underneath? What’s going on? And when what’s beneath that cloche turns out to be simply a bland piece of raw fish, as it did at the Whitney Gala in 2016, the course is a total dud. It was an empty gesture (and not an inexpensive one, when you consider there were six hundred guests and those cloches are an item that—whether rented or owned—had to be carefully packed and shipped to the site).

  That same night, the main course also had a similar ante-raising appearance: a log-like loin of lamb enrobed in a dusting of powder the color of an army jacket. Its daunting appearance was an implicit challenge, making you think: this better taste good. So, when that powder, a “pea crust” made of ground, dehydrated English peas, actually tasted bad—earthy-musty, with a faintly algal aroma like the smell of an unclean fish tank—guests up and down the table scraped it off with their knives. Purely from a food standpoint, the dinner was a double fail and the speeches hadn’t even started.

  Some event planners actually believe that, despite the current mainstream food mania, in the context of everything else that happens at a special event, especially a charity fund-raiser, the food is not so important. And that might be true, to an extent, if the food is simply unremarkable; when food is bad, it can really have a profound effect on the room and the people in it. As the Whitney event progressed to the speeches and performances, the guests decided—perhaps unconsciously—that they were likely to be burned by dessert. The moment Seal’s riveting acoustic performance had wrapped, three-fifths of the room got up and left, either for home or for the after-party. By the time the servers came out with dessert, just fifty of the original six hundred guests were left in the room. And 550 plates of a build-your-own sundae—as it happened, the most technically challenging and by far the most successful course of the night—went in the trash.

  Another hazard of food design in catering can happen when a concept is really too brilliant: it may attract imitators. When social media are able to broadcast a cool canapé instantly to millions of people around the world, the chef’s original design is likely to be knocked off by somebody, somewhere, in a matter of hours. For an outfit like Pinch, it happens regularly, even though the bright idea may take years to trickle down to the more conservative firms. Eight years after Pinch created the parasol pop-up, Brooklyn-based caterer Abigail Kirsch, one of the largest mid-tier catering firms in the city, tweeted out a photo of her new “pretzel umbrella.” To be sure, the imitation went only so far: this was a rather more ungainly take on the parasol—a clear plastic umbrella with New York–style pretzels hanging from it. And the notion required two servers: one to hold the umbrella, a second to follow behind with a squirt bottle of mustard.

  We emailed the Pinch folks the image and followed up with a phone call asking if they’d seen it.

  “We don’t actively pay attention to other caterers,” Spiegel said.

  “I don’t investigate or do reconnaissance,” Girard said. “In fact, I don’t want to know.”

  �
��We wouldn’t have seen that photo if you hadn’t sent it.”

  There was dejection in both their voices, but Girard brightened a bit. “It’s a little disheartening, but we’re not dwellers. We’ve inspired this industry and that’s flattering. And at the same time, it forces us to dream up something new.”

  Spiegel was still downbeat. “It’s sad for me to bury something, but the ’brelly will have to go. We love the idea and we know the effect it has on people. And to say good-bye to it just because somebody else is doing it is hard.”

  He confessed to having reached out once or twice on social media in the past—much to Girard’s chagrin—to call out former chefs who’d worked in his kitchen and posted knockoffs of Pinch designs without giving credit.

  Girard was optimistic, noting with enthusiasm that she’d heard from a wedding planner that there’s a shorthand in the industry for demanding that the caterer make the food look better, be more attention-grabbing, perform a little bit: “Can you Pinch that up?”

  “Look, we jump-started something new,” Spiegel said. “The definition of catering was always ‘give people what they want.’ We’ve gone beyond that by creating food you never even imagined.”

  As many events as we’d worked by that time, we’d never served out food that sought to do anything beyond looking beautiful and being delicious. High-concept design seemed to add only more dangers to the risk calculus of the traveling circus. But perhaps this trendy, fun-factor food brought so much happiness and joy to guests that it actually eased the tensions and pressures of the event in ways that weren’t calculable. For example, when the balloon wafts past, holding aloft its tray of mini brownies filled with a milk panna cotta, does anyone say, “Sorry, I’m allergic to dairy. Can you make me something else?”

  10

  No Milk! (Butter and Cream Okay)