by Matt Lee
Davis orchestrates it all: the Michelin-starred meals, of course, but also the hotel suites, theater and concert tickets, museum admissions, spa treatments, transportation, security. It helps that he’s the kind of person who loves nothing more than some city functionary standing in his way, telling him he can’t launch fireworks over the Tiber River at midnight, the finale to an opera-themed dinner in the Knights of Malta Room at Piazza Colonna for those Fortune 500 executives.
Davis will find a way around any obstacle, a talent he honed in far less grand circumstances. Forty years ago, he was a journeyman chef trying to get his fledgling Washington Street Café and Caterers off the ground in the emerging (and then-desolate) neighborhood of Tribeca and bid on a job making brunch for six thousand people. At the time, he had little more than a rented apartment in Soho and a borrowed kitchen in the friendly wine bar downstairs. Against all odds, he won the bid and arranged for the corner bodega to loan him its walk-in refrigerator for a few days. He cleaned his apartment bathtub, which became the bowl for tossing the six thousand portions of pasta salad.
One gets the sense that Davis’s stories get taller the longer he tells them, but in this case, one of his former employees, Sara Foster, confirmed the story without prompting. Sara is the celebrated cookbook author and chef-owner of Foster’s Market, in Durham, North Carolina, and we knew that in the eighties, she’d been a lead chef at Martha Stewart’s catering operation in Westport, Connecticut. So we called up Foster to see what kind of war stories she had, and when we asked where she first learned to cook professionally, she dropped Ronnie’s name. She’d been a chef at Washington Street Caterers for a couple of years and learned everything she knew about how to cater large parties from him.
“We had so much fun back then,” she said. “It was wild. Would you believe we used his bathtub to toss pasta salad?”
It turns out you can use your bathtub as a pasta salad bowl. We don’t necessarily condone it, but if you ever have to make pasta salad for several busloads of people, you may not have a choice. And should you choose to accept the challenge, we offer this recipe, whose Italianate flavors pay tribute to the quintessence of haute catering in 1982.
But note: depending on how porous the enamel in your bathtub, the tomatoes may dye it a light shade of pink, as it did in Davis’s case. Although he had resigned himself to replacing the tub once his lease was up, his landlady assumed he’d done it on purpose: she loved the color and found it “so artistic.”
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Yield: 30 gallons (600 four-ounce servings)
TIME: 12 HOURS
Equipment:
One 5-foot-long (measured end to end at the rim) enameled cast-iron bathtub, with drain plug and drain catch
Two or more 32-quart stockpots
Six 22-quart Cambro containers
A chest refrigerator or walk-in
Large food processor
One 36-inch wood stirring paddle
For the pasta salad:
Kosher salt
Olive oil or vegetable oil
22½ pounds dried tricolor rotini
45 pounds ripe tomatoes, cored and cut into medium dice (about 30 quarts diced)
4½ pounds sun-dried tomatoes, drained of their liquid and chopped (about 15 cups)
11¼ pounds pitted and chopped kalamata olives (about 37½ cups)
30 pounds feta cheese, cut into medium dice (about 26 quarts plus 1 cup)
For the dressing:
1 gallon plus 3 cups mild-tasting olive oil
1½ quarts red wine vinegar
3½ pounds sun-dried tomatoes (about 11 cups)
60 cloves garlic (about 5 whole heads), peeled
¾ cup kosher salt, plus more to taste
½ cup freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste
1. Stopper the bathtub drain and fill two-thirds full with cold water. Cook the pasta: bring as many stockpots of salted water as will fit on your stovetop to a boil. Once the water boils, add ¼ cup oil to each pot, followed by the rotini, about 5 pounds per pot. Cook until just tender, about a minute less than the time indicated on the package.
2. Drain each pot of pasta (reserve the cooking water for the next batch) and, working as quickly as you can, use the Cambros to transfer the rotini to the bath water to cool, stirring with the paddle until the temperature of the water and the pasta are equivalent. Replace the stopper of the drain with the drain catch and strain. Transfer the rotini back to the Cambros and place in the refrigerator to cool completely.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until all of the pasta has been cooked and cooled. In a large food processor, make the dressing in six batches: pour about 3 cups of the olive oil, 1 cup of the red wine vinegar, about 2 cups of the sun-dried tomatoes, 12 cloves of the garlic, 1 tablespoon of the salt, and ¾ tablespoon of the black pepper into the bowl of the food processor. Process until the dressing is smooth.
4. Plug the tub drain with the stopper and transfer the chilled pasta to the tub. Scatter the tomatoes, the sun-dried tomatoes, the olives, and the feta cheese evenly over the rotini and paddle the salad around the tub to evenly distribute the ingredients throughout. Pour three-quarters of the dressing evenly over the salad and continue to paddle until the dressing is evenly distributed. Season to taste with more dressing, salt, and pepper.
5. Transfer the pasta salad back to the Cambro containers and return to the refrigerator until time to transport to the venue, not more than 12 hours. The salad should be served at room temperature.
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12
The Happy Couple Fancied Themselves Food Curators
Matt Examines the Role of Food in Weddings
Whoever said “Food is love” never worked for a caterer—and certainly never worked that quintessential catered event, the wedding. Two people joining together in holy matrimony of some kind is the oldest story in human history; gathering friends and family around a meal to celebrate this bond is just as natural: invite people you love. Serve foods you love. If you want to load the deck further, play music you love. And yet weddings are never this simple.
What makes it all so complicated?
The British journalist Rebecca Mead, who in 2008 published One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, heaps a good deal of blame for the consumerist spectacle and attendant stresses of the American wedding upon the bridal industry. For Mead, wedding planners, dress designers, cake bakers, and caterers have tarted up newfangled, fabricated rituals in the drag of “tradition” in order to sell more bejeweled cake knives, scented bridal candles, and wedding-night lingerie ensembles. This is what was done in the past, the marketing goes; now you must do this, too. Although Mead’s book is enormously entertaining—the scene of wedding planners at their annual convention taking swings at a “Bridezilla” piñata is priceless—it was pilloried by some critics for the bah humbug it rained on all the joyful silliness of “the big day.”
Today, Mead’s account of the excesses of the great white wedding seems downright quaint. She published her book two years before Pinterest and Instagram went live, enabling everyone with an iPhone and a WordPress account to be a reporter, a wedding planner, a bridal-lifestyle brand, an “influencer.” In Mead’s world, the thick, heavy magazines—Modern Bride, Martha Stewart Weddings, Brides—still held sway, with their copious advertisements, lavish fashion spreads, and hyperventilating editorial (SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS OF FABULOUS GOWNS, Brides, December 2008). But today’s bridal tastemakers are constellated across the digital landscape in tens of thousands of blogs, social media accounts, and “verticals.” Their fashion, decor, and food ideas are published the moment they click Send, then broadcast again once those ideas get adopted (or adapted) IRL (in real life). Then, if all goes well, they’re viralized by wedding guests in Snapchats and tweets, Facebook Lives and Instagram Stories, around the world, ad infinitum. This system is likely to blame for the “flash-mob” processional, among other fun/cute wedding innovations.
Over the last ten years, t
he stream of bridal culture across the collective conscious grew into a social media Niagara Falls, and while that’s taken some pressure off weddings to be “traditional,” it seems to have been replaced by the pressure to be “original,” with all the anxiety that entails. (As with “tradition” in 2008, “originality” in 2020 need not be factually demonstrable; the appearance of originality is what matters.) Today’s couples are less after the “fairy-tale wedding” than the Tale That’s Never Been Told, that’s unique to them, the story of us, the one that catering salesman Collin Barnard is ever soliciting. As a bride recently told Vogue, “It was important that all of the events [at our wedding] felt authentic to each of us individually and to our relationship.” That meant in addition to Giambattista Valli heels for her and patent-leather Yves Saint Laurent sneakers for him, the bride and groom commissioned Brooklyn-based artists Leimay to craft a work of performance art for their reception—a dance inspired by an episode of the bride and groom’s favorite radio program and performed both on land, among the circulating guests, and in a synchronized pool routine, by three women wearing bespoke dresses and headgear composed of hundreds of toy butterflies. (And you may have thought a specialty cocktail on the bar was a gratuitous personal touch!)
I learned firsthand the way “authentic to us” plays out in the field of food ethics on the very first wedding I worked, at Locusts on Hudson. Despite the grim portents of the name, this riverside acreage just ninety miles north of New York City was one of the nation’s most coveted farm-idyll wedding venues. (The guy who named the estate, just a decade after the signing of the United States Constitution, surely never imagined the place renting out for $4,000 a weekend in 1797 dollars—$60,000 in 2016 ones.) Patrick Phelan was still Sonnier & Castle’s chef on that wedding, a Sunday before Labor Day. The temperature was in the high nineties with 100 percent humidity, and there was no trace of a breeze. Through the haze, the Hudson River was a thick brown soup.
It was exactly the kind of wedding Patrick loved. The happy couple fancied themselves food curators and had worked with him over months, making each course of their dinner a tribute to a trip they’d taken, a chef they’d met, or a particular food passion of theirs. For the cocktail-hour passed hors d’oeuvres, they’d chosen the cutting-edge bites from Patrick’s playbook: sepia (cuttlefish) with compressed watermelon; sous-vide shrimp with squid-ink aioli; chicken liver with chocolate; a raw bar. We were nine kitchen assistants plus Juan and Jorge Soto, Patrick, and Tyler; the ceremony and reception were happening on the terrace of a manor house overlooking the river. The dinner would go down further into the woods, at a complex of Victorian barns—massive cathedrals in weathered wood, with ornamental quatrefoil windows. Stunning, and stifling, as the barns were entirely without air-conditioning. The box truck with the food got lost and arrived an hour late, so when it finally pulled in, we were rushed. I was assigned to hors d’oeuvres serve-out with Tyler and a few others, and after we’d unloaded our proofers, coolers, and dry packs into the tent by the river, Patrick and the rest struck out for the barns to set up dinner.
Tyler delegated to me what seemed to be the easiest hors d’oeuvre—Chicken Liver Mousse with Chocolate-Madeira Cookie. I’d seen this canapé, downright bizarre, on Patrick’s Instagram feed: you took a gossamer-thin chocolate wafer the size of a Scrabble tile, dabbed a dot of chicken liver mousse at one edge, then stuck another chocolate tile over the liver, edge to edge, to form a tentlike thing that stood up on the platter. Twelve little pup tents to a platter, they looked like Donald Judd sculptures in miniature. When Tyler handed me the first sheet pan of chocolate cookies, I noticed there were nearly as many desiccant packets packed beneath the plastic wrap as cookies.
“Don’t unwrap these yet,” Tyler said. “With the humidity, we’ll need that silica gel ’til the last possible moment.”
The latte-colored chicken liver mousse in the cooler was hard as a rock, so I took the top off to temper it and pulled the sheet pan of chocolate wafers close, getting my station orderly for the first-platters call. As soon as the pâté had warmed, I tore a small hole in the plastic and tried making a sample. The first tile I picked up cracked immediately under the pressure of my fingers, so I tried again, more gently, but that one crunched, too. With the point of a sharp petty knife, I released the entire sheet of cookies from the parchment, piece by piece, without breakage. Ever so carefully, I swabbed a tiny dab of chicken liver gently against the edge. I laid another wafer gently on the chicken liver and tapped it. Voilà! My weird little chocolate-liver tent looked exactly like Patrick’s photo and I set it carefully on my platter.
But when the call came in for first passes, I discovered that my sample had been a fluke. For every three I attempted, one broke, and the longer the cookies sat out in the heat, my failure rate increased. After the first half hour, I was down to one completed pup tent for every three or four tries.
The server picking up my hors d’oeuvres came back from the floor with her empty platter, and she’d wait patiently for five or fifteen minutes—however long it took—for me to get twelve pieces to send out to guests.
“Chocolate and chicken liver sounds so gross,” she said, brightly. “But people seem to like it!”
Tyler passed by, saw me struggling, and all the wasted cookies I was generating, and said, “Just do the best you can.” So I muddled on, mashing shards and crumbs into liver. When the reception was over and we were packing everything away, I learned I wasn’t the only one agonizing about wasted effort. I overheard servers from the oyster bars grousing that they hadn’t had much interest, with the ice melting so fast, dribbling into the oysters. Who wants to eat a warm oyster in August?
We all were transported to the dinner kitchen and immediately folded into the plating of the smoked trout salad on the main floor of the barn. “Take a look at the sample and get moving,” Patrick said. “We need to push these to the floor before they wilt.” It was only the second of six courses.
At the end of the night, waiting for the van to come pick us up, I was still smarting from my disastrous hors d’oeuvres service. I told Patrick I didn’t think it was my fault. “Why would you set us up to fail like that?”
“You think I put that one on the menu?” he said. “Fuck no, that’s on Sales.”
“Who eats oysters on a hundred-degree day?” I asked.
He blamed the sales team for that, too. “Look, I can talk to Sales ’til I’m blue in the face—seasonality, weather, all of it,” he said. “But their job isn’t to make our lives easier, it’s to sell parties.”
We were checking our phones when he told me the planner, a twenty-year veteran in the industry, had just texted him that the food was “best-ever.” The bride and groom were over the moon. I wondered how any guest could process the story that the oxtail-and-lobster surf and turf was supposed to be telling in the heat of that barn. Why hadn’t they spent the oyster-bar budget on air-conditioning?
“Just watch,” Patrick said. “Stick with us, and you’re going to look back and see. Tonight is just a blip on the map. Like, ping!” He flicked his finger. “Gone.”
And yet I kept that memory throughout my time in catering, along with other nights that seemed to corroborate two lessons: a) the most stressful moments for workers in off-premise kitchens arose from bad decisions made months earlier, in places very far removed from the reality of the kitchen, and b) the larger the party budget, the more likely it was that unwise and risky decisions would be enabled.
Weddings add another layer of complication. A company throwing its holiday party or a charity hosting its annual gala is pure business—an event-as-marketing device or fund-raiser (sometimes both); two human beings joining ’til-death-do-us-part has mortal and spiritual stakes: families merge, fates are sealed, souls are laid bare (and God, presumably, is watching). The human-drama quotient is off the charts, and yet I’ll bet you my best chef’s knife that no one preparing the food knows so much as the bride’s name. That profound disconnect—�
��hollowness,” to use Danny Meyer’s term—amid all the purple sentiment on the other side of the pipe and drape was almost unbearable.
So when the Soto brothers asked me to join their team on a wedding at the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank, I was tempted to decline. But there was something about a wedding in a bank—setup to a thousand father-of-the-bride punch lines—that piqued my interest beyond knowing about the lavish restoration. I’d seen the outside of the building’s Beaux Arts dome countless times from the elevated M train, but I was itching to get inside; artist friends who’d deposited their meager earnings in the place back when it was an HSBC branch in the nineties said it was Met Museum majestic.
On a chilly Saturday in November, I rolled up on my bicycle to the corner of Driggs Street and Broadway to find Juan and Tyler in puffy parkas, smoking and shuffling their feet to keep warm. The truck hadn’t arrived with our proofers yet, and Tyler was eager to show us around. We walked through the service entrance into a long gallery with masonry barrel-vaults rippling across the ceiling. Servers were already building bars in the room, stacking rocks glasses on linen-set tables. Juan passed me the party grid—it was a cocktail reception and seated dinner for three hundred, with a migratory run of show: the wedding began with the ceremony on the second floor; guests would then descend to this gallery space for an hour-long reception, then head back upstairs once the second floor had been reset for dinner and dancing.
Through a small door off the gallery was a corridor that would be our hors d’oeuvres kitchen, and we shucked backpacks and coats against a pillar—one of two huge columns in the room that, along with stacks of rental crates and prep tables, made the space a labyrinth. It was already claustrophobic and none of the food had been loaded in yet.
“All the proofers’ll fit in here?” I asked Tyler.