Hotbox

  Neumark invited us to meet her for lunch at Mae Mae, the café her company runs out of a corner of the twenty-three thousand square feet of leased space in an industrial building on Vandam Street, in Soho. In 1982, the same year the cookbook Glorious Food appeared in bookstores, Neumark hatched an idea for a small business. She was a native New Yorker, recently graduated from Barnard with a BA in political science, but she aspired to be a fine-art photographer and needed money for film and darkroom supplies, so she signed up with Lend A Hand, a temporary employment agency, and waitressed at fancy parties (including a few at Leonard Bernstein’s house). Neumark’s idea was to create a party-staffing agency by and for women artists and performers, so they could make money between casting calls, rehearsals, and performances. She asked her father for a loan of $250 to set up the phone line for Great Performances/Artists As Waitresses, Inc.,1 and set up the office in her bedroom.

  Her first hire was a friend, a flamenco dancer from Minneapolis. Strictly by word of mouth, and within a matter of weeks, Neumark amassed a quorum of staffers and a stellar reputation among the city’s newer, younger caterers—ones without the deep bench of waitstaff that Glorious Foods maintained. Great Performances grew rapidly by responding to clients’ demands, first by bringing men aboard2 and later by bringing the hors d’oeuvres and canapés themselves. In those early days, Neumark purchased pigs in blankets, chicken satay skewers, and cucumber sandwiches (crusts off) from the very caterers who used her staffing services, and her crew simply transported the food to parties. One day, an employee told Neumark she had a nice kitchen in Queens and could make better food at a cheaper price, and very soon after that they realized they’d need a larger kitchen, one more centrally located. Neumark had been in business less than a year, but she secured a loan from the First Women’s Bank for $25,000 and signed a lease on fifteen hundred square feet of ground-floor space on Crosby Street, between Prince and Houston Streets, in Soho. The neighborhood was still largely a manufacturing district, and the new premises allowed Neumark to move Great Performances’ office out of her bedroom, gave everyone plenty of room to cook, and created a space to throw parties once in a while. The new kitchen seemed palatial to her then; little did she know that in ten years she would sign a lease for a space with five times that footprint.

  Among the first calls Neumark made to clients announcing the move into catering was to a guy she’d been buying hors d’oeuvres from—Ronnie Davis, chef and owner of Washington Street Café and Caterers. Davis was none too pleased about having a new competitor, but he wasn’t in a position to protest, as he’d already booked Great Performances staff to serve food and pour drinks for his entire roster of parties that year. (Immediately after our lunch with Neumark, she introduced us to Davis, who now works for her, running the division of the company that produces its most elaborate and far-flung events.) Davis’s own business had grown exponentially in the two years since his first New York catering gig, a brunch for six thousand—three thousand per day across two days—on the lawn of Gracie Mansion during the 1980 Democratic National Convention. Like Neumark, Davis had an undergraduate degree (sociology, Villanova), but catering ran in his blood. He was third generation in the business, born in Philadelphia to Harry and Lydia Davis, the top kosher caterers in the city, who, like Harry’s own father before him, produced lavish bar mitzvahs and weddings at all the fanciest banquet rooms on North Broad Street. Davis had grown up apprenticing to his father and, after college in Pennsylvania, worked in Annapolis, assisting the private chef to financier Barron Hilton—Paris and Nicky’s grandfather. He followed a girlfriend working in the fashion industry to New York City in 1976 and eventually got hired as chef at the Wine Bar in Soho, one of the first spots in Manhattan to offer wines by the glass, served with small plates of cheeses and pâtés purchased from the spanking-new gourmet food purveyor around the corner, Dean & DeLuca. During Davis’s tenure at the Wine Bar, he was invited to bid on the contract to cater New York City mayor Ed Koch’s 1980 Democratic Convention brunch, and he won. To be sure, that event had had its hairy moments—for those numbers, he had to mix pasta salad in the bathtub of a walk-up apartment (see Bathtub Pasta Salad recipe, pages 231–33) but there was a eureka moment as well. Standing next to Koch and Senator Ted Kennedy on the sun-splashed lawn of Gracie Mansion, he watched as two New York Fire Department boats motored up the East River and idled in front of the lawn of the mayor’s house. One boat shot its water cannon, a geyser of water dyed blue, and the second boat shot out red, high arcs that crossed one another in midair. And it was then that Davis thought: I want to produce events like this.

  He gave notice at the Wine Bar and started to build out his own restaurant in a small warehouse with a loading dock on windswept, industrial Washington Street in Tribeca. He installed warm lighting, painted the exposed-brick walls a shade of creamy peach,3 and built one of New York’s first open restaurant kitchens, from which he turned out a small menu of French bistro classics: veal marsala, tarragon chicken, filet au poivre, tortellini with Roquefort cream sauce. Washington Street Café, as he called it, was a casual joint, more ragtag than the sleek brasserie the Odeon that opened that same fall a few blocks east, but with a similar bohemian clientele of neighborhood pioneers. And in off-hours, Davis used the café’s kitchen to prepare for the catering jobs he’d begun to book the very day of the Gracie Mansion gig. In addition to Mayor Koch and Senator Kennedy, he’d met the commercial cinematographer Bob Gaffney, who hired Davis to cater his birthday celebration. At Gaffney’s party, Davis met executives from several top New York advertising agencies and a smattering of TV networks. And those contacts led to more catering jobs—some of which required production chops in addition to food preparation: he chartered a barge and parked it under the Brooklyn Bridge for a family reunion of descendants of the landmark’s designer, John A. Roebling, on the centennial of its completion. That same night he met Hollywood TV legend and producer Norman Lear, who hired Davis to cater and produce the first People for the American Way gala dinner at the Puck Building. In Lear, Davis had discovered not only a client but a mentor, who taught him the stakes—and rewards—of event production at its most ambitious level. The morning of that first PFAW gala, Davis invited Lear in to inspect the room—the tables had been set down to the last dessert fork, the chairs were in place, the sound system had been installed, and all the decor and lighting were positioned. Lear clapped three times and listened to the echo. “Terrible acoustics, Ronnie,” he said. “Carpet the place.”

  “Norman,” Davis shot back. “No.”

  “Carpet it,” Lear said, and walked out of the building.

  So Davis ordered ten thousand square feet of a tan-colored carpet and instructed his crew to move every piece of furniture, the table settings, all the glasses off the floor. They carpeted the room and had it reset in less than six hours, well before the bars opened and first hors d’oeuvres went out.

  “I didn’t think you were going to do it,” Lear said when he arrived at the venue for the party.

  “I did it,” Davis told him and sheepishly presented him the bill, in the low five figures, for the carpet and extra labor.

  Lear took the bill, smiling, and said, “Fine!” And for the next decade, until the organization moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., Lear made sure that Washington Street Caterers always produced the organization’s annual dinner.

  The progressive politics and downtown location of the People For the American Way gala were seemingly a world away from the Upper East Side precincts in which Donald Bruce White and Glorious Food had found their prosperity. But the younger caterers were finding plenty of money to be made outside of the Social Register, and their very kitchen locations reflected a cultural shift taking place in Manhattan, as heavy-manufacturing companies departed the nineteenth-century cast-iron loft buildings of the downtown commercial districts for outer boroughs, New Jersey, or counties upstate. Where the previous generation of off-premise catering pioneers had started out of
their apartment kitchens uptown, this new wave was building businesses that from the beginning were more professionalized (the bathtub pasta salad notwithstanding), but housed in comparatively inexpensive—and infinitely more serviceable—commercial lofts and warehouses of downtown Manhattan.

  Liz Neumark had settled in Soho and Ronnie Davis in Tribeca; the Flatiron District was home to Susan Holland, who, like Neumark, had grown up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Holland attended the High School of Music and Art and Pratt Institute, and after graduating she began to achieve some success as a painter, showing in galleries in New York and Los Angeles. In the late sixties, she married and moved with her husband to Washington, D.C., and soon learned that if she was going to eat a decent loaf of bread there, she’d better bake it herself. With unsold canvases piling up in her studio, Holland found that baking bread—consumed and enjoyed the same day—gave her the immediate gratification she’d been missing in her art career. She threw herself into food and cooking with a passion. Holland began hosting dinners for friends that generated excitement in her social circles, so much so that in 1972 the wine club her husband belonged to, the founding chapter of Les Amis du Vin, asked Holland to be the chef for a tasting dinner in a rented corporate apartment. The club4 had initially conceived the event for thirty guests, but on the strength of Holland’s reputation the count swelled to sixty. She recruited a food writer friend from New York, Carole Lalli,5 to come down and help her cook, and the evening was a smash success. Les Amis du Vin invited Holland to teach at its cooking school, where Washington Post food editor William Rice and Carol Mason, a caterer, were also instructors. With Mason, Holland formed her first small catering company, We Cook, in 1973, doing small dinners in private homes in Georgetown, Bethesda, and Silver Spring.

  By the late seventies, Holland had divorced and moved back to New York City, where she opened a firm, Susan Holland & Company, in a loft on the fourth floor of a building at the corner of Nineteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. Upon settling in New York, she began to see the way her art training in color, pattern, and abstraction meshed with her enthusiasm for cooking and interest in ephemerality, how all of that came together in the course of an event. Dinner wasn’t just delicious ginger-chicken skewers and boeuf à la mode served at the right temperature—it was also candles, flowers, conversations, everything converging in a site-specific “installation” of escalating, transcendent moments for guests.

  In marked contrast to that grand vision, Holland’s New York career began with the same routine at-home dinners and dreary cocktail receptions that she’d booked in D.C. But Holland soon learned that in New York there was a demand for excellence in catering—and she could charge handsomely for it. This was the dawn of the eighties: entertaining—the way food was served, the style in which one celebrated—was increasingly becoming a part of newly wealthy New Yorkers’ public personae. Holland’s first big break came in 1985, when the young, upstart producer Scott Sanders, who’d been hired by Radio City Music Hall to turn around the fortunes of the moribund theater, tapped Holland to cater the food for a series of celebrity-filled soirées at the venue. And although she’d never before cooked parties at this scale, she had an inkling these would be the dinners that provided the opportunity to realize her holistic artistic vision. She threw herself into the culinary challenge with gusto and, before long, Sanders made her event producer of all opening nights, with complete and total design control over the party. From the eighties through the mid-nineties, Holland trained on her feet, learning lighting and florals and furniture and props, indulging her artistic whims at the same time she rolled the pastry for the pigs in blankets. These nights at Radio City were the early foundation for Holland becoming, twenty years later, “the go-to designer,” according to the New York Times, for the city’s most extravagant gay weddings, and, eventually, for her triumphant return engagements in D.C., the city where her food passion had been sparked, in the role of designer of White House state dinners for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

  Glorious Food reigned supreme in New York in the early 1980s, when this younger generation—Davis, Holland, and Neumark—was just getting on its feet. But as the eighties folded into the nineties and the art and music of downtown came to define New York culture—with its own wealth, its own style, its own parties—Glorious Food’s standing in the firmament began to show the limitations of dwelling in the air up there. Glorious couldn’t cater every party in New York on any given night—it might not have even wanted to—but Sean Driscoll didn’t like losing out on business to anybody. When, in 1992, Madonna launched her book Sex at the meatpacking-district photo studio Industria—one of the decade’s most lavish and most photographed parties—were her reps going to give Driscoll a call? Not a chance. (They called Davis.)

  And Glorious Food’s dominance began to show weaknesses in other ways. In 1986, Glorious folded its catering operation in Washington, D.C., after only three years. The Washington Post covered its closing in an unusually in-depth story that barely disguised the writer’s schadenfreude. “In the end,” trumpeted the lede, “there weren’t enough people in Washington with expensive tastes for glorious foods.”

  But back in New York, the catering business was beginning a wild ride—even as it was ravaged by the AIDS crisis.6 More and more independents were getting into the game, inspiring the food writer Nancy Jenkins to write a story spanning the front page of the New York Times Living Section on November 28, 1984, headlined: CATERED PARTIES: NOW IN ALL SIZES. Her interviews made plain the breadth of new caterers in the firmament and also noted that the establishment was feeling the presence of competitors (if maybe not yet the pinch). “Catering is the cottage industry of New York,” Donald Bruce White told Jenkins. “All a caterer needs is a Cuisinart, some pots and pans and a couple of food magazines to start out.” And if his dismissiveness hadn’t been obvious enough, he added: “They get jobs, though they don’t necessarily get repeats.”

  Jenkins credited the explosion in catering to a number of factors, among them the emergence of the “obsessive interest in food that seems to have gripped New Yorkers,” and also the rise of two-career couples eager to entertain business associates, friends, and family, but with scant spare time. She reported that the new breed of caterer was open to creativity and to global influences, and less likely to hew to White’s tenet that the customer was always right. One Brooklyn-based caterer she interviewed had created a feast of Japanese dishes for one client, but rejected the request of another for a Jell-O mold.

  As the clientele for catering grew, the choice of places where people might party also expanded. By the late seventies, both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library had opened their doors to “externals”—one-off events hosted by non-Met-affiliated people, but their kind and number changed dramatically by the mid-eighties. Hosting an event at the Met in 1979 required completing an application proving your event’s artistic mission (a colloquium, say); if approved, you made a donation to the museum of $5,000. Broadening that policy became quite controversial among the Met’s board of trustees, but financial imperatives won out. By 1985, the doors were fully open, so to speak: anyone could rent one of its grand spaces for the night (the glass-ceilinged modern hall housing the Egyptian Temple of Dendur was among the first and most popular) as long as they ponied up the then $30,000 fee.

  The success the New York Public Library and the Met had in monetizing their spaces for product launches and weddings got other cultural institutions, such as Lincoln Center and the Frick, hip to the earning potential of their majestic lobbies and ballrooms—all the more essential in the wake of the financial crash of 1987. Amid this constellation of emergent party palaces in the late eighties and early nineties, Liz Neumark made waves again, pioneering a new sector of the catering industry most firms had never considered: venue management. Great Performances became the first of the independent event caterers to contract with the city’s cultural institutions for exclusive
- or preferred-status relationships. An “exclusive” at a museum meant that GP (as the firm came to be known as it grew) ran the museum’s café and was the only option for a bride and groom wanting to throw a reception there; “preferred” status meant the happy couple was incentivized to use GP as their caterer but could choose from a list of independent, preapproved firms if they paid a premium on their rental fee. And since GP retained the contract to run the café regardless of how many weddings or corporate holiday parties went down at the museum, the relationship served to stabilize operations at the prep kitchen during down cycles in the economy.

  Another lasting development in the hotbox landscape was that caterers began emulating restaurant food and culture more directly. “Nouvelle Cuisine” had crossed the Atlantic in the early eighties, and chefs were no longer just laborers, they were now artists. The late eighties saw the dawn of the celebrity chef, with Food & Wine publishing its first “Best New Chefs” issue in 1988, and the James Beard Foundation holding its inaugural awards ceremony in 1990, to dole out to American chefs what became the restaurant industry’s top achievement awards. The nineties were a veritable boom time for dining out in New York City. Ruth Reichl assumed the role of restaurant critic at the New York Times in 1993 and was on her way to becoming America’s first celebrity restaurant critic, reviewing (and adoring) places like Gramercy Tavern, Union Pacific, Jean-Georges, and Vong, where the outlook was international, the flavors zingy and bold, and the presentations playful. Francophile cuisine was on the way out.