Hotbox

When Bob Spiegel and Carla Ruben opened their firm in 1990, calling it Creative Edge, they were staking a claim for a forward-thinking, artistic approach to catering, in line with the restaurants of the time. And when Russ Sonnier and David Castle opened Sonnier & Castle in the latter part of the decade, they knew they needed to bypass the Glorious old guard to capture a younger clientele, customers who would compare the food at S&C events to the city’s exciting new fine-dining spots.

  Sonnier & Castle plucked its talent off the line of important or promising restaurants, finding chefs in their late twenties who had grown weary of the Order! Fire! routine, and were curious about the pay raise that came with a move to catering. With restaurant-trained chefs, there was a learning curve, however, and Sonnier & Castle had to invest time with someone like Robb Garceau, who came from Vong, or Scott Forzaglia, hired away from Daniel, teaching them the catering-specific tricks of event-kitchen management, proofing, plate-up, planning, and flow. But the firm valued the culinary acumen and attention to detail these chefs brought when it came to sourcing, freshness, technique, and presentation; hiring artistic-leaning chefs (the kind who would struggle creatively against the compromises of off-premise catering) differentiated S&C from its competition.

  Just as caterers in the nineties began to align themselves with restaurant culture, restaurant chefs with name brands got into catering—partly due to demand from their customers, but also because their kitchens represented a huge fixed cost as rents increased; if a kitchen isn’t maxed out twenty-four hours a day, that’s earning potential squandered.

  “For a very long time,” Neumark told us, “caterers were the bottom feeders of the industry, and no reputable chef would do catering.” All that changed in 1994, the year Daniel Boulud, one of Food & Wine’s first class of Best New Chefs, debuted Feast and Fêtes, the off-premise catering arm of his eponymous restaurant, which had opened just one year before (1994 was also the year Boulud won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef). Helmed by Jean-Christophe Le Picart, a catering veteran who’d sold his own firm, Tentation, to a French conglomerate just a couple years before, Feast and Fêtes was an instant hit, and Le Picart remains president and partner in the operation twenty-five years later. Leagues of restaurant chefs would look to Boulud’s success when they attempted to cater, but few could pull off this bipolar challenge. As Neumark explained, “Putting out four hundred, six hundred, a thousand perfectly uniform plates in fifteen minutes is alien to most [restaurant] chefs, and the really smart ones know their limitations.”

  Many restaurant chefs we talked to in the course of writing this book told us they’d foundered on the shoals of event catering, whether it was a chef who did a one-off experience and ran screaming back to the comfort of her gas ranges, or Bobby Flay, who took the full plunge, opening a catering division of Mesa Grill in the early 2000s. “That was the worst year of my life,” he told us. “I had to torch that business, I got rid of it.” Beyond the operations and logistical challenges he faced, he was incensed whenever a wedding planner, post-tasting, would circle back, angling for a better deal. “When have I ever had a customer at my restaurants say, ‘I know the hanger steak is seventeen dollars, can I get it for fourteen?’ Never!”

  Eric Ripert, who has won multiple James Beard Awards and whose modern French seafood temple Le Bernardin consistently garners the highest accolades from the New York Times, witnessed enough horrors in his youth to vow never to cater outside the comfort zone of a restaurant kitchen. “We never put ourselves in those positions. The quality dictates everything around it, and we will never compromise,” he told us in a recent interview.

  The one exception to his rule was a wedding for eight hundred outside Boston, for a client with especially deep pockets. But true to his credo, there was to be no compromising on the food or the equipment: “To be able to do that, we asked the gentleman to build four kitchens for us. Same thing as Le Bernardin: cooking fish à la minute.” His entire staff traveled to Massachusetts two days before the wedding to make sure everything was in place with the four new Le Bernardins. “The gentleman also paid for Le Bernardin in New York to be closed for three days,” he added.

  But an even more expensive and more telling object lesson in the gulf between the restaurant and catering businesses may be seen in the rocky path hospitality guru Danny Meyer, New York’s most famous restaurateur, took into catering. We were eager to learn how, in 2005, he had added the traveling circus hustle to a portfolio of bricks-and-mortar restaurants that thrive on the serenity of their fixed locations, their houses. Patrick Phelan—who’d interviewed unsuccessfully for the chef position at Meyer’s new firm, Hudson Yards Catering, when Robb Garceau left it in 2011—had tipped us off that building a catering business hadn’t been all wine and roses for Meyer.

  We met Meyer and his catering manager at the time, Mark Maynard-Parisi, in a suite of offices in a cast-iron building on the east side of Union Square. They were friendly, but circumspect at first. Meyer wanted to know: were we writing a hit piece? Catering Confidential?

  We explained how we’d been impressed by an off-premise team we’d observed at the James Beard House, and were wondering why nobody had written anything about the world of grand-scale food events. We were hoping to educate ourselves, and the general public, about the subculture of catering.

  He seemed reassured, because once he got started, it was difficult to get a word in edgewise. He had stories to tell, and they were mostly lamentations. “Every night in catering is ephemeral, it’s one-and-done. Nobody on the team knows where they are. Every movement is labored and contrived and self-conscious.”

  As skilled as Meyer and his team had become in pulling off large events by the time we met—they’d recently prized the Robin Hood Gala, that biggest, baddest charity fund-raiser in America, a forty-four-hundred-person, $3,000-a-plate dinner, from the clutches of Glorious Food—Meyer expressed more than a little regret for ever having entered the catering game. He confessed his group would never have done it if they hadn’t been so desperate in 2005 to open a new fine-dining flagship (the one that became the award-winning restaurant the Modern) inside the Museum of Modern Art. When the museum (MOMA) put out the request-for-proposal to operators, Meyer’s team learned the operating contract had stipulations: if you wanted to run the restaurant, you also had to run MOMA’s 350-seat staff cafeteria, its 300-seat café for museum visitors on the fifth floor, and the 65-seat café on the first floor. Lastly, you got “preferred” status as caterer to the museum’s event-venue business (which has no dedicated kitchen at all, just the same loading dock where the crated Warhols and Matisses get shipped in and out during the day). So Meyer’s group had raised a ton of money from investors, built the O’Hare Airport of commissary kitchens in the Terminal Warehouse building in far West Chelsea to support the catering operation, and soon discovered some very painful lessons about the new industry they had entered.

  Meyer’s team hadn’t realized that being “preferred” caterer for MOMA’s event-venue business by no means meant that Hudson Yards was the museum’s exclusive caterer; it meant only their name was at the top of a list of two dozen such preferred caterers. And the fact that Meyer ran some of the best restaurants in New York City didn’t matter a whit to risk-averse party planners; as a new firm, it’d be a pariah in the industry until it garnered a reputation for doing large events well.

  So Hudson Yards was in a classic chicken-egg situation, and Meyer soon found out how different the staffing challenges were from restaurants to catering. Because events is an “accordion” business—one night you’re cooking for eight people, the next night eight hundred, and the next night zero—most of your staff are freelancers; you can’t afford to buy them uniforms, so they’re wearing the same basic black pants and dress shirts they wear to every event, regardless of what caterer they’re working for. Since your staff is constantly in flux, people are being trained on the fly, and they’re taking whatever skills you do manage to impart to them to one of your
competitors the following night. The ills of the restaurant business that he had spent decades taming returned by the dozens in catering.

  But the most demoralizing point of difference in Meyer’s mind was the lack of collegiality among caterers; he had no mentors to hash out his problems with because it’s a cutthroat, market-share business, especially so at the upper end. Sure, the thousands of restaurants in New York compete with one another, but Meyer still had a vast community of restaurateur friends he could meet from time to time to chew over problems. Not in catering. Shortly after they’d won the bid for the museum businesses, he spotted the owner of a competitor firm dining at the Modern with some friends, and he approached their table to introduce himself.

  “I hear you’re getting into off-premise,” the other guy said. “Well, good luck to you.”

  “Any time you want to get together,” Meyer said, “I’d be happy to meet for lunch.”

  “Are you crazy?” the man retorted. “That’s not how it works in catering! Every event we get, you don’t get; and every event you get, we don’t get. You and I are never going to be friends!”

  Although Meyer’s O’Hare of kitchens was doing only a Midway Airfield’s worth of parties, they gradually, fitfully, built Hudson Yards from mostly small and medium-size functions, inching up toward larger ones, gaining some confidence and momentum. Then the crash of 2008 hit, and quite a few catering firms didn’t survive that year. What saved Hudson Yards were two things: the New York Mets called, wanting Meyer to bring Blue Smoke and Shake Shack (the burger joint in Madison Square Park he’d begun as a side hustle partly to maximize the off-hours potential of the Hudson Yards prep kitchen) to the team’s new Citi Field. Second, they rebranded the firm, changing the name Hudson Yards to Union Square Events, laundering its checkered early reputation by allying the firm with its stellar sister restaurants. It was also a more overt method of pushing their catering clients toward the menus those restaurants offered, and away from the labor-intensive, free-form customization of menus common among most boutique firms in New York.

  Alas, now that his catering business has found its footing, Meyer confessed he brought a wistfulness to even the most wondrous parties they pull off that arises from the doubt that a special event could ever aspire to the warm embrace of hospitality found at his restaurants. “If I go to an event,” he said, “I usually don’t know the guests very well and I don’t know every person on staff. To be honest, it all feels a little … hollow.”

  Perhaps wanting to brighten the picture, Maynard-Parisi spoke of the thrill he gets from a beautiful, glittering wedding in full swing.

  “I always love walking around the head table after the main course drops,” he said. “Seeing the bride and groom and their parents enjoying the reception, then walking back to the chaos of the loading dock. I often think: I wish the bride could see just how insane it is, where all this magic is coming from…”

  “No!” Meyer said, laughing. “No we don’t! We hope she never does! The best catering is like good special effects—you don’t even realize they’re special effects.”

  As true as the statement seemed—the mechanics of catering need to be hidden behind curtains and doors so the pageant appears effortless—it also made us wonder: do caterers only ever enter a guest’s consciousness when someone’s messed something up? Is the invisibility somehow beneficial, like an averted glance—a way to escape notoriety if things go awry?

  And that nagging question returned, What kind of person chooses to throw himself into the breach, night after night after night?

  Since Meyer and Maynard-Parisi had so much experience around both restaurant chefs and catering chefs, we asked them whether they’d found common characteristics among the men and women who choose the catering world over restaurants.

  “Perfectionism,” Meyer said. “They seek perfection in the planning, but they won’t be demoralized by what happens. You can’t be demoralized in catering.”

  Maynard-Parisi offered, “They’ll say ‘I’ll climb a higher mountain.’ ‘I’ll jump out of the airplane.’ When you see them in the kitchen tent, it’s like a war room. They love it.”

  * * *

  In the past decade, restaurant and catering cultures have become especially cozy, with celebrity chefs appearing at large catered parties to lend sizzle and a lauded restaurant’s imprimatur to dinner—a trend that shows no signs of abatement. Liz Neumark, again, was at the forefront of this, creating events she now calls “hybrids.” They arose out of Great Performances’ success providing operational support in the early 2010s for out-of-town restaurant chefs who descended on New York to cook for the James Beard Awards Gala. A hybrid is a larger-scale version of the dinner where we first met Juan, Jorge, and Patrick, an event where a crew of hotbox heroes supports a restaurant chef working in unfamiliar environs. The marquee chef arrives in the GP kitchen a day or two before the event and collaborates with chefs and K.A.s there on the best way to translate her dishes at volume. GP is by no means the only firm doing such events; it’s a format that’s become popular with party planners and especially corporations, who have the big bucks and who see the marketing value in having a name-brand chef in the house. Mimi Van Wyck, who runs the tony event firm Van Wyck & Van Wyck with her brother Bronson, recently hired a handful of such chefs for a dinner, each assigned to a different course. At events like these, Van Wyck always brings in a well-versed catering team to support the celebrities, and she typically insists on a day or two of dress rehearsals for the kitchen, adding considerably to the expense of the evening but greatly increasing the odds of success. “It has to be like clockwork,” she said. “There are no second chances.”

  When Bronwyn Keenan, the event director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, produced her first hybrid party for the Met’s Chairman’s Council Dinner, she tapped Daniel Rose, executive chef of Coucou, the French restaurant in New York that in 2017 won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant. The evening required massive coordination, a level of production Keenan had never attempted for an event that small. There were only one hundred diners but, as with the Frick dinner Matt worked, just down Fifth Avenue, these were the most important ones … trustees/billionaires. It entailed a total of four catering teams: Rose and his chefs from Coucou added a second crew from Starr Events, an off-premise caterer owned by the restaurant group that owns Coucou. There was also staff from Restaurant Associates, the on-site caterer who has the venue management contract with the museum and could best translate the quirks and limitations of the facility; a fourth caterer, Olivier Cheng, known for superior staffing, provided the waiters and waitresses.

  “It was the pinnacle,” Keenan said. “Absolutely the closest we’ve ever got to a restaurant experience.” The members of the Chairman’s Council were ecstatic, she said. “Now they want it to be like this all the time!”

  And therein lies the problem. When you succeed in making catered food the equal of restaurant cuisine, you dispel the protective fog of low expectations, the rubber chicken factor, that can surround such events. Every Chairman’s Council Dinner sets the bar higher than the one before—and it must, or the job of the person responsible is in jeopardy. To a party planner charged with producing an annual event, the future looks like an ever-steepening slope; the creative pressures of a one-off event like a wedding seem tame in comparison. Planning for next year’s even-more-perfect dinner must begin the following morning.

  We’re confident the catering industry will deal with the escalating pressures it faces in the ways it always has, slashing operating costs wherever possible, investing in labor-saving technology, and by raising prices—in short, by adapting. In the relatively brief time we worked in catering, we witnessed more and more caterers adopting the industry-standard software CaterExpert, which integrates a kitchen’s recipe book with purchasing and billing, to allow a chef to calculate the food cost of a party down to the last penny and pinch of salt. Digitizing the torrent of information that Pam Naraine holds in her
brain allows everyone throughout the organization to see in real time the bottom-line benefits of menu standardization (and by contrast the high cost of customization).

  In this latter regard, too, we sense a swing of the pendulum in catering culture, away from the client and back to a more focused, holistic approach to food that acknowledges, especially at the higher end, the wisdom of the catering chef. As long as there are billionaires willing to pay handsomely to get their dreams brought to life in food, there will always be a market for hyper-personalization, but large caterers at the upper end are beginning to look again at the long-disdained practice of driving clients toward set menus, A, B, C, D, and E, tailored to certain seasons and types of events, that best showcase the firm’s talents and keep the food production on terra firma.

  Another change under way: just as downtown Manhattan precincts became the place to set up shop in the eighties and nineties, Long Island City, Queens, has become ground zero for catering firms changing with the times; in our two-plus years working in the field, at least three firms moved to larger, less expensive leased premises in the neighborhood—allowing them to grow their production capacity while remaining within striking distance of all Manhattan’s glittering venues and new ones in Brooklyn.

  BATHTUB PASTA SALAD

  Tricolor Rotini with Black Olives, Feta, and Sun-dried Tomatoes for Six Hundred

  Ronnie Davis is the tough-talking, silver-maned Eric Clapton look-alike who runs Ronnie Davis Productions, a niche business within Liz Neumark’s company Great Performances—the largest independent caterer in New York City, with about $50 million in annual revenue. If you can imagine a special-events catering operation crossed with a luxury-travel agency, that’s Davis’s domain. He’s the guy you tap when you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and it’s been a good year and you’ve got a few million dollars in the budget to take your executive team and their spouses on a celebratory trip to Rome (or Panama, Sydney, Kyoto, Beijing).