Hotbox

  He laughed. “They better. You have no idea, there’s so much food on this party.”

  I glanced at the grid again. Dinner was only two courses—a salad, then a short rib and sides—but the cocktail hour that preceded it featured two bar snacks, eight passed hors d’oeuvres, and a full Asian-themed buffet station with fifteen items: five kinds of sushi, sesame and udon noodles, three flavors of steamed dumplings, and an array of yakitori (Japanese-style grilled skewers). We’d need to cram at least a dozen separate stations into that room.

  Tyler ushered Juan and me through the gallery and up a narrow staircase of filigreed ironwork, into a Gilded Age–meets–Hogwarts scene of marble, polished wood, and brass door fittings. Arriving in the main rotunda, we gazed up at the dome a hundred feet above. The wedding’s designer had parried all the dizzying, baroque grandeur with a minimalist-rustic chuppah (the canopy where a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony is performed), a sculpture of intertwining birch branches hung with fresh white orchids, smack in the center of the hall. We stood there just taking it all in, until the production crew setting chairs for the ceremony hustled us along.

  Adjacent to the main rotunda was another massive hall where long dinner tables were set with mirrored tops that reflected the round, stained-glass oculus some sixty feet above us—the apex of a domed ceiling only slightly less ornate than the first. Tyler led us past the original bank vault with its crazy-thick door propped open, past an iron birdcage elevator—the oldest in operation in New York City—and back down the stairs, ticking off the challenges we’d face over the next six hours. We’d have only a few minutes to transform the reception venue into the main-course plating line, then each plate would require its own steel cover to keep the food warm traveling up that narrow staircase. Teams of runners would hoist plates six at a time on trays to hand off to the waiters; as for salad plate-up, we’d need to juggle jack stands and double-decker the prep tables since the room allotted for first course had the square footage for only a hundred plates. In short, we’d need to have our sharpest wits about us.

  But our most immediate challenge, one that became all too apparent when the gallery became clogged with K.A.s and servers moving coolers and proofers into the corridor, was finding space to work. Tyler and Juan doled out assignments, and I was paired with Saori, on bar snacks and grissini, Italian breadsticks in three different flavors that were stuffed into highball glasses to accompany the main course. Everyone clambered around the room, reaching into proofers, coolers, and dry packs, spinning speed racks, trying as fast as they could to locate ingredients and claim stations. Saori found our bar bites—sticks of carrot, celery, and cucumber and green goddess dressing for a crudité, and tubs of Parmigiano-Reggiano crumbles for piling artfully on a wood plank alongside the veg and dip. I found our planks and the cylindrical glass bowls specified for the veg and the dip, but we’d been shorted a few pieces of each. We didn’t have a table to work on, so we fashioned one from cutting boards placed atop stacks of glass-rental crates. The room had settled down, except for a forlorn kitchen assistant who couldn’t find space to work and had collared a service captain, to inquire if he could move a very large cardboard box that was taking up room on a table.

  The service captain was peeved. This wasn’t his kitchen, after all. “What even is this?” he shouted.

  “I’d look inside,” he said. “But there’s no seam on top.” He knocked on the box and it made a hollow sound. He shouted out to the entire room, “Does anyone know what’s in this box? Who put this here?”

  One of the K.A.s waiting for the table to clear began banging on top of the box like a drum. Soon his buddy joined in, and they were drumming from the top and the sides now. I squinted to read what looked to be a logo discreetly rubber-stamped in the top corner of the box, but I could barely make it out from my station across the room. Then it hit me—it was a mark I’d seen on a delivery van on Metropolitan Avenue, outside Milk Bar, a popular bakery.

  “STOP!” I shouted. “THAT’S THE FUCKING WEDDING CAKE!”

  The two guys who’d been drumming on it went silent. The service captain rolled his eyes and stomped off to find Tyler, who, when he arrived, asked me to write “FRAGILE” in Sharpie on all sides. Once they stopped molesting the wedding cake (a six-tiered number that cost $6,000, I’d later learn), there it sat—unrefrigerated, in a space so liminal and chaotic it would have been safer resting on the sidewalk. In only a few hours it would be shuttled from this corner of the makeshift hors d’oeuvres kitchen to take its central role in the pageantry of the wedding.

  The rest of the night spooled out pretty much as Tyler had warned—the compression of the venue came with risks. A jack stand of 110 burrata and roasted carrot salads nearly went down when one of its casters sank into a soft piece of floorboard. A server bit the dust on the stairs carrying a tray of main courses, but we replaced those six and recovered. When Tyler cut me and a couple of others loose for the night just before the wedding cake was served, I was grateful.

  As I headed home, I wondered if the couple had hired an independent cake mover—yes, that job exists in New York, yet another line item on the budget (about $1,000 or more). Probably not, or it wouldn’t have ended up as a musical instrument. I thought about my teammates, working to put out the best food they possibly could, but with minimal resources and knowledge. The cake incident seemed to prove that if you take away enough information from the workers, you’re undoubtedly setting them up to fail. Who would stack the odds against the kitchen any more than they already were?

  A couple of weeks passed and I went online to see what images of the team’s handiwork I might find from that wedding. I discovered a slide show of almost two hundred photos, not only beyond the pipe and drape, but from hours before the event had even been set up. The bride’s $1,200 studded Louboutin pumps, poised heel to toe, against a polished concrete floor. Now the bride in lingerie in the duplex loft of a Brooklyn hotel with the Manhattan skyline in the background, gazing up at her gown hanging in the window, the dress alongside the Empire State Building. Now she’s trying on the gown, in front of the bridesmaids, fresh from the hotel’s spa in their matching black robes. Now it’s the groom’s turn to get dressed, throwing a series of male-model pouts (“who me?”) and set pieces for the photographer. I clicked forward wondering what, if any, food might be pictured. Surely an alluring cocktail? The gleaming architecture of the tuna tartare? My tricolor grissini spiking artfully out of their highball? In almost two hundred photos were just two, both of the wedding cake from Milk Bar Bakery. The food, the segment of this wedding that held perhaps the greatest creative potential, was also the most intimate, since everyone ingests it. Yet for all that centrality to the experience, the meal we prepared was apparently a throwaway element. Contributing to that may be the evanescent nature of food itself, quick to disappear and decompose down three hundred gullets; the Louboutins will live on, so inspire greater tribute. But was that okay? Was it okay to put so much premeditation, work, and care into a once in a lifetime banquet, only to see it disappear with little notice? Is it enough to make the food safe, in a literal sense, and little more? It didn’t quite sit right with me, and yet my coworkers seemed copasetic. A blip on the radar, ping!, there are two more fiestas tomorrow!

  As it happened, the most successful wedding I worked from a culinary perspective was a simple buffet of comfort food. I was nearing the end of my time in catering and wanted to go out on a high note, and this wedding held the promise of high-wattage celebrities.

  I showed up at Sonnier to board the van on a Saturday in midsummer, and Tyler was in good spirits. He had some new ringers on the kitchen team, gave me the clipboard with the K.A. roster, and told me to make sure everyone got on the van. He was driving to the venue in a separate car, picking up Juan Soto and Jhovany León Salazar in the Bronx. Since he figured he’d arrive on-site after the kitchen van, he asked me to lead the troops, getting the kitchen boxed out, linens on tables, until he landed. I found my
people and checked them off.

  In an hour’s time, our team met up with the service van in a parking lot in Greenwich, and we all boarded a larger shuttle that drove us through a leafy neighborhood with mighty mansions and manicured lawns. The bus dropped us off at a driveway with a sprawling neo-Gothic stone estate at the end surrounded by parklike grounds. Midway down the drive was a tented table manned by two giant security guards, remarkably friendly despite appearing to have settled quite a few bar brawls. We exchanged our cell phones for claim tags. A paparazzi helicopter did a lazy circle overhead.

  The day was hot (welcome to wedding season!) with storm clouds brewing. A guard led us in groups along a brick path to a broad expanse of lawn where an enormous white party tent had been erected and, beyond it, the service tent for both kitchen and sanitation. I did my best to rally the team, even though there were quite a few new faces, and we conferred over the grid and the kitchen plan. An hors d’oeuvres kitchen on the far side of the estate wouldn’t be staffed and stocked until the box truck arrived. A refrigerator rented to chill the wedding cake had already been delivered, so I matched it up on the kitchen plan and dispatched some K.A.s to set tables in place to receive the cake. I couldn’t locate the table linens, so I collared the service captain in charge. He was out on the floor, amid a swirl of fabric (not mine), and he suggested my linens may have ended up on the far side of the property, in the cocktail kitchen.

  I took off across the lawn just as the rain began. The house was to my right on the top of a slight rise. I was halfway past the house, couldn’t yet see where the cocktail kitchen was—and I began to realize that the ground beneath my feet was supersaturated from the previous day’s rain. I noticed my clogs were getting wet just as I heard behind me someone shout: “HEY! CHEF!”

  I froze. A female security guard in a black suit was sprinting as best she could across the pudding-soft lawn from the dinner tent toward me, with a walkie-talkie in her hand. “STOP!”

  I instinctively looked up toward the house, and silhouetted in a French door set into the side of the house facing the lawn was an impossibly tall figure in a gown, likely the doyenne of this family of stars.

  “She does not want anyone stepping on this wet lawn!” the security guard said. “Do you understand?”

  I apologized profusely, asked her how to get to the cocktail-reception kitchen. She pointed out the right way to go, back by the driveway near the phone check. “You’re already on the lawn,” she said. “It’s too late. You might as well cross now. But don’t do it again!”

  By the time I got to the reception kitchen, my clogs were soaked, my pride shot. But I found those damn linens, bundled some over crossed arms, recruited a sanit guy to carry the rest. On the way back to the kitchen tent—the correct way—I looked across the green and saw, in the distance, three or four of my kitchen team, whom I’d commanded to stay put, ambling across the wet grass in front of the house, looking like they were out for a Sunday stroll. In seconds, the security guard materialized, chasing after them, shouting—full meltdown. I couldn’t bear to look, and felt grateful my name wasn’t higher on the leaderboard for this event.

  The linens were in place and taut by the time Tyler arrived, and he seemed pleased, but I had to inform him of the lawn faux pas—last thing I wanted was for him to hear it from the party planner. He laughed it off—he had bigger problems on his mind. Rain was coming down in buckets now, just as we were unloading the truck, and Juan and I spotted a waterfall pouring down from the tent flaps onto the electrical transformer for the kitchen tent. I reached for a sheet pan to fashion a shield for the box. Juan said, “No!” and handed me a plastic bus pan that fit perfectly over it. “Don’t take any chances,” he said. “That’s metal.” I was grateful those guys were on-site now—what other instincts of mine were going to trip me up that day?

  As it turned out, none. Despite the scolding, that event was one of the happiest ones I worked. The thunderstorm passed just after the ceremony, and the sun shone through, bright and hot. Leave it to the truly famous to order up perfect party food—three buffet stations of pure comfort, foods people love: fried chicken and mac and cheese, Bolognese and wild-mushroom ravioli with Parmesan cream, a roast beef carving station. And by now I knew: you can tell a great celebration because the servers become like mirrors, reflecting the energy of the room. When they return to the kitchen with empty platters, sashaying to the music, and saying, “They’re demolishing this mac and cheese!” you know guests are having fun, and you feel compelled to work faster to keep pace with the energy and consumption level. As the hours advanced, things loosened up. There was plenty of dancing, and celebrities started chatting with servers.

  I was on a mixed bus back to the city—service and kitchen. Most of the K.A.s crashed out, sleeping, but the waiters and waitresses were ebullient from their proximity to stardom. One waiter—a struggling actor—who’d been delivering drinks to the groomsmen before the ceremony, called his mother on speakerphone to run down the names of everyone he’d met. She went nuts. He’d endured a scolding, too, from the matriarch—for over-serving the guys. As the van tacked off Interstate 95 and swayed down the Henry Hudson Parkway, I tipped my head back and thought through the dozen or so weddings and engagement parties I’d worked in the last two years, and about the food at Ted’s wedding (barbecue, catered by Blue Smoke, served family style; ten years on, everyone still remembers the ribs). What had I learned? By the time the van pulled up in front of Sonnier & Castle, I’d come up with a few Food Rules for Successful Weddings, which I shared with Ted when I got home (my own wedding was family-only, a table for twelve at the late, much missed New York restaurant Chanterelle). We polished them up and offer them here.

  •  Serve what you like to eat. If you’re the bride or the groom, and you’re requesting a special meal, maybe everyone should be eating the special meal. (If it’s a chicken cutlet, make sure it’s damn good. Remember the rubber chicken joke.)

  •  The more items you put on your buffet, and the more courses there are in a seated dinner, the less likely anyone will remember any of it the following morning. 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 2 when it comes to wedding banquets.

  •  Let deliciousness be the most memorable thing about the food. The more you force what you serve to tell a complicated story about you (anything more than the fact that you chose it, which is implicit), the more likely your guests will put down the fork and disengage from the tale.

  •  When selecting the food for your wedding, think first about seasonality in the context of the venue you’ve chosen. Is there any likelihood of it being infernally hot and humid? Or, alternately, frigid? Make certain the food you choose envisions the most extreme conditions for the time and place.

  •  Either the bride or the groom should take a quick moment if at all possible to step behind the pipe and drape, to offer a smile and a thumbs-up to the kitchen staff. Connecting on some level with the people making your wedding happen will make it memorable for everyone.

  NUPTIALS BY THE NUMBERS

  •  Number of weddings in the U.S. in 2017: 2,180,000

  •  Average cost of a wedding in the U.S. in 2017: $33,391

  •  Average cost of a wedding in the most expensive place to get married in the U.S., Manhattan, in 2017: $76,944

  •  Average cost of a wedding in the U.S. in 1979: $2,200 (7,845.65 in 2017 dollars)

  •  Number of weddings annually at Weylin, a venue in Brooklyn: 24

  •  Percentage of those that happen on a Saturday: 95%

  •  Percentage that happen on Fridays: 2%. On Sundays: 2%

  •  Most popular months for weddings at Weylin: October and November (tie)

  •  Average guest count for weddings at Weylin: 200

  •  Percentage of weddings at Weylin cooked on hotboxes/proofers: 60%

  •  Percentage of weddings at Weylin that use preferred caterer Abigail Kirsch: 75%

  •  Avera
ge number of vegan weddings annually at Weylin: 1

  •  Number of wedding cakes that have fallen on the floor at Weylin since the venue opened its doors in 2013: 1

  •  Party features prohibited at Weylin: fire, confetti, and helium-filled balloons

  •  Strangest item to show up in Weylin’s lost-and-found after a wedding: an adult male’s tooth

  * * *

  Sources: TheWeddingReport.com; TheKnot.com; Wall Street Journal; Weylin, Brooklyn, NY

  13

  Piercing the Veil

  The Lee Brothers Work Their Final Fiesta

  Absurdities and grotesque entitlements become routine when you immerse yourself in high-end catering. There is a young, ambitious caterer in New York whose food-obsessed, billionaire client regularly charters a Gulfstream G-Five jet to smuggle into the United States a half-dozen poulet de Bresse chickens from Rungis Market in Paris. The cost? Roughly $200,000, inclusive of French ground support. There’s an event planner with clients who demand custom, artisan-made plates and bowls for their dinners, used for one night only, because rentals simply won’t do—they’re too common. As Bronwyn Keenan, events director at the Metropolitan Museum, who presides over hundreds of events annually, said, “We’re way, way beyond the Gilded Age. Budgets for parties are multiple times what I paid for my own house. Every week I’m building a house over forty-eight hours, and then tearing it down in twelve.”

  Spend time in this world, and it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that at the root of the $12 billion catering industry is a universal impulse: the same emotional spark that drives the backyard cookout with your neighbors, or your niece’s sweet sixteen at the church parish hall, or your grandparents’ sixtieth anniversary in the assisted-living community—let’s celebrate! In the latter part of the twentieth century, when events became fully transportable, loosed from the fixed landmarks of the parish hall, the club and hotel banquet room, hosts were free to seek out new environments, built or natural, to gather their friends and family and live it up. And the impact that liberation had in the marketplace was to encourage people with money to create new reasons to party as well: how might this party perform for my company? Or for my arts institution? Or for my charity?