by Matt Lee
A group of people coming together over a meal soon became a marketing tool for corporations and nonprofits. And in boom cycles especially, what passes for a celebration in the culture became increasingly spectacular, year upon year, with the quest for novelty and one-upmanship perpetually driving new ideas and dimensions in events. While it’s true that economic catastrophes of the past thirty years—like Black Monday in 1987, or 9/11, or the crash of 2008—served to slow the growth in catering for short spells, the hyper-customization in catering we encounter today may have actually planted deepest roots during those worst of times. Since it was only ultrarich families and businesses who still had discretionary money to entertain, event caterers desperate to keep revenues flowing were compelled to say yes to every outlandish whim. When the bar is lowered in a downturn, it can be difficult to raise it again once the economy comes roaring back.
But it’s clear to us now that the more features and menu line items you add to a party, the more vendors you bring to bear upon it, the easier it is for everyone involved to detach and lose sight of that elemental desire for human connection that spawned all that labor. Keenan said that when she first came to the Met in 2012, from a similar position at the Guggenheim Museum, she had to fight the notion within the institution that an event was “a bunch of boxes that had to be checked. What is an event? It’s a party, it’s supposed to be fun,” she said. “Every museum I’ve worked in, it’s: how can we just get back to the fun, and stop taking ourselves so seriously.”
Our Hotbox journey began by being amazed at the specialized skills of food mercenaries who run the kitchens that feed the most ambitious American celebrations. We were curious to learn the particulars of their specialized food crafting in food-inappropriate spaces, but also why their labor seemed unjustly underappreciated, mostly invisible to the outside world. And the more we learned, the more questions we had. At first it seemed the dissociation between prep kitchen and event kitchen, and between the event kitchen and the “floor,” was at cross-purposes to the very goals of a party. It was inconceivable that an executive chef might not know the host’s name! In any kitchen, there’s typically a “lineup” before service when the chef tells servers what’s on the menu; why not institute a lineup with party planner and host, introducing themselves to the kitchen and sharing their ideals for the fiesta? Wouldn’t it at least make a modicum of sense to play the same two-minute mission video they’re playing for the moneybags in the room that night for the catering crew? So that there’s some context for that beet-tartare canape that’s going to stain my fingers red for the next three days?
What we were surprised to discover was a culture that in some ways craved its own invisibility, the ease of gliding from one night to the next, one emergency yielding to the next catastrophe with total concentration, unflappability, and detachment. Not caring too much is a defensive mechanism that can prolong your career in the industry, increasing the odds of survival. The Hotbox Nation is populated by people who instinctively, in Danny Meyer’s words, “climb that higher mountain, jump out of the airplane.” But there’s a rootless, restless element to the psychology of the catering mind that becomes apparent only once you’ve spent time inhabiting it. According to Meyer, “nomadism is in their wiring, and they don’t seem to crave the family-unit a restaurant foundation affords.” Which feels true generally—and certainly when you understand the common itinerant-theatrical and military threads connecting the Patrick Phelans, Sean Driscolls, Donald Bruce Whites, and Jean-Claude Nédélecs—but falls apart on the example of the Soto brothers, Juan and Jorge, who have studiously crafted a measure of success and a semblance of family within all the shape-shifting meals on wheels, night after night. In fact the Mexican and Central American diaspora, which has indelibly marked modern catering’s language and resourcefulness, seems largely responsible for preserving what humanity remains in the business.
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One of the last catering jobs we worked was an annual Labor Day party in the Hamptons, an event we’d signed up for the previous two years running. By the numbers—225 people—this was hands-down the highest-dollar-per-person production of any event we ever touched (the first-year guest count had been 160, and everyone called it a “cookout”; in year two they dispensed with that euphemism). The site was the private home of a cable television CEO perched above the golden-white sand of East Hampton Beach. For days in advance, various crews worked to prepare the property, covering the swimming pool with flooring, erecting the kitchen tent on the far side of the driveway, building a stage and overhead lighting truss for the band (no local acts here; think Rod Stewart or Diana Ross), trailering in air-conditioned “comfort stations,” and trellising them with a small forest’s worth of live Virginia alder so they blended with the hedgerow along the property line.
The lane that dead-ended at the party location was bucolic and residential, so a parking lot had been secured four miles away for the various vendors’ trucks and trailers, and a transport firm shuttled the personnel back to the site: the landscapers, the A/V producers, the security team, the tent crew, the caterers, and the sand sculptors. A life-size shark-attack tableau down below the bluff, on the beach, in the lee of the dunes, took the sculpting team several days to complete and served as focal point for the kids’ dining area (which had its own small kitchen, on the sand behind a bamboo windbreak). After the musical star’s last number, a fireworks show by the Gruccis would light up the sky with strobes and willows, comets and chrysanthemums, detonated from a launchpad a couple of miles downfield, so nobody on the terrace had to crane their necks to see. Like the Macy’s Fourth of July show, but just for you.
The first year of that party, we had been so green and clueless, we spent the entire time trying to stay out of the way of the other kitchen assistants, whose movements seemed so intuitive and lightning-quick. Patrick sensed our disorientation and managed to assign tasks a safe distance from the kitchen tent. Ted grilled three hundred hot dogs on the host’s gas grill up on the terrace and, from that vantage point, served Martha Stewart (who didn’t recognize him out of context) and witnessed some big-picture triumphs firsthand, like Patrick convincing the party planner that running an electric fryer in the sand dunes (so the children’s french fries wouldn’t lose their crispness traveling from the kitchen tent to the beach kitchen) was a recipe for disaster.
We were eager to witness what had changed year after year at that party—if it might say something about where the catering business was headed. But we also wanted to see how far we’d come in our own understanding of what mattered and what happened in the field. The first year, the sheer quantity of food being shoveled out was astonishing—once dessert had been served to the guests and we were closing down the kitchen, we were able to feed all the vendors that night from the leftovers, almost a hundred more people: the entire catering team, the security guards, the valets, the babysitting crew, the A/V folks, and the members of the band’s entourage. The second year the menu had virtually doubled, even though the guest count had risen by only fifty. Where there’d been one buffet station in year one, now there were three, each with a different themed menu. And outside vendors had been brought in around the periphery of Sonnier & Castle’s bill of fare. There was a Del’s frozen-lemonade cart for the kids. A food truck had driven out from Manhattan and parked at the valet station, giving away enormous Belgian waffles heaped with fruit, chocolate, and whipped cream in paper boats to take away—just in case the banana split buffet with six flavors of ice cream and sixteen toppings, the four pies on the pie bar, the s’mores station, the cake in the shape of a shark baked by television’s “Cake Boss” Buddy Valastro, the brown-sugar-glazed pineapple kebabs, the sliced watermelon, and the fresh-fruit skewers had been insufficient or unappealing.
This Labor Day—our third time doing this party—the ride out on the Long Island Expressway was slow going, traffic rubber-banding from the Queens border all the way out to the East End. And once we exited the highway, the co
astal route 27A was backed up to a standstill. Juan Soto knew this geography well and gamed the traffic, tacking the van north of the two-lane blacktop, shuttling past cornfields and vineyards, and then crossing south of it. The streets became leafier, the hedges higher, and the houses larger the closer we got to our destination. We turned onto Lily Pond Lane, the road Bob Dylan recalls going “when the weather was warm” in his 1975 confessional “Sara,” and Juan halted the van at the security checkpoint at the top of the dead-end street. A beefy older guy in a black polo and wraparound Oakleys was interrogating the driver of a golf cart in front of us. Between a break in the hedge outside my window, there was a rambling, Grey Gardens–esque home with barnlike gambrel roofs and gothic windows. Mature, overgrown rosebushes climbed up its cedar-shake walls, weather-beaten to the lustrous silver-gray of moth’s wings. It seemed entirely possible that the Bard himself, in a rumpled blazer, bolo tie, and guitar slung over his shoulder, might walk through the hedge any second.
The security guard waved the golf cart down the street, and Juan pulled the van forward to the invisible line where he stood. He stepped to the window and Juan uttered a single word, “Cater.” The man lowered his shades on their tether, took a cursory look inside the van, chef coats hung over the windows shading the dozers, and waved us on through. A service captain waited at the end of the lane to escort us to the kitchen tent, and we gathered our belongings and piled out.
The box truck with the food had already backed up to the kitchen tent, and everyone crunched across the gravel driveway toward it, slowing to ogle the spanking-new red Ferrari, low-slung and wide-bodied, and, parked next to it, a showroom-condition sixties vintage Porsche convertible, also red. The team whistled and gawked at the vehicles before the service captain reined it in with a curt, “Hustle, people.” On the opposite side of the kitchen tent, for ours and the other vendors’ use, were two weathered porta potties, familiar from previous years. We had hoped staff facilities might be improved upon with each passing year, with each doubling of the menu options, but apparently not.
Once we loaded in the proofers, coolers, and dry packs, Tyler gathered everyone in for assignments, and we got a look at the party grid in his folder. It was a full three pages long, forty menu items per page. Guest count had increased by only ten over year two, but the quantity and variety of food seemed to double again. There were four bar snacks and thirteen passed hors d’oeuvres, five buffet stations, all with a boilerplate New Orleans twist. A raw bar set up in an ice-filled rowboat offered East and West Coast oysters (none from the Gulf), clams, jumbo shrimp, crab claws, and five seviches: scallop, red snapper, shrimp, tuna, and hamachi. The slider station had three BBQ options and a vegetarian lentil burger. There was a jambalaya station and a manned po’ boy action station, stuffing sandwiches to order with shrimp, chicken, or blackened grouper. Finally, there was a “main” buffet with cedar-planked salmon, barbecued chicken, meat loaf, tofu steaks, and six vegetable side dishes. The s’mores station was back for dessert, but new this year were a cake, pie à la mode, and cobbler bar with five varieties of pies, four-layer cakes, and ice creams shipped in from the Cincinnati scoop shop Graeter’s. Also: passed desserts, five kinds of ice-cream sandwiches along with Big Easy–style pralines, served with shots of Baileys Irish Cream. Burp.
There were more lead chefs in the kitchen tent this year, and Tyler assigned us to work seviches with one of them, Christian, who’d recently become one of Tyler’s main deputies. He was a sullen guy, who seemed to relish the opportunity to reprimand or school K.A.s, with attendant eye rolling and head shaking. It didn’t matter so much, as we were feeling comfortable compared to the two prior years, when we had mostly doused fires. Find the missing skewers! Wash these enamel pails! At those events, it was difficult to tune out whatever was happening in the peripheral vision, so the work seemed doubly chaotic. Even though there was so much more food this year than last, more K.A.s and traffic in the tent, the structure and the flow of it all made a kind of sense now.
We were tasked with marinating the various seafood items in lime juice to “cook” them. The event planner had made a last-minute decision to have the server at the station spoon the seviches to order from large bowls into shot glasses, rather than having us preportion the shot glasses in the kitchen tent, which made things easier. We had all our seviches mixed and in their bowls by go-time, so Ted helped Jorge Soto’s hors d’oeuvres team, wiping clean the platters when they came back and passing them to their stations to refill, while Matt organized the backup seviches, making sure we had enough to replenish on the fly.
The party was in full swing and the buffets had been open an hour or more when Tyler transferred us off seviches and up to the terrace, to the po’ boy station. The stage backed up against the house, and Harry Connick Jr. had just begun performing his first set on the piano as we threaded our way through the crowd and into position. Among the faces watching the show were Martha again, Oprah and Gayle, Dr. Oz., and we recalled Patrick’s admonishment the first time working this party, about the style of service Sonnier called “Always Correct”: a K.A. or server on the floor only ever acknowledged a guest with a nod and smile, and never spoke unless spoken to.
The po’ boy station was farthest across the terrace from the stage, next to the platform where a team of guys in headsets controlled the sound and light boards. Our area had a little stage of its own, a level surface at the rim of the bluff overlooking the driveway. The topography of the bluff meant the fryers were set up at the edge of the floor, not far from the feet of the guy serving out the food. Our fryer chef stood in the grass and smiled with relief when we arrived. He passed mixing bowls, quarts of buttermilk, and deli containers of a breading mix, and we knew what to do. There was really nowhere to set up, but the sound guy moved a couple of crates from the end of his platform, at the perfect height for us to fashion a dredging station. We dunked the shrimp, chicken, and grouper into the buttermilk in series, taking care not to cross-pollinate the fishy buttermilk with the meaty buttermilk, then tossed them in bowls of breading mix. The dripping, battered protein chunks we handed off in fits and starts to the fry guy, and we soon hit a rhythm. The demand was strong, and after an hour or so, our buddy passed a deli of fried shrimp to offer to the dude on the sound stage who’d provided us with the clutch space.
Before long, we’d caught up to the line at our station and were able to relax somewhat, to appreciate simply being outdoors on a beautiful night and working with a team. It seemed a reflection of how far we’d come that we could almost wordlessly migrate into a station, barter for resources, improvise, swim with the stream. When demand for po’ boys slowed further and we had plenty of backup protein, Tyler transferred us again, off the terrace and down to the driveway. The Ferrari and the Porsche had disappeared, but a bright red stagecoach wagon branded CAFÉ DU MONDE, the legendary New Orleans coffee shop, had been set up precisely where the waffle truck had been parked the prior year. Tyler explained: guests would receive bags of hot, freshly fried beignets and chicory coffee on their way out. Two waiters would proffer and serve up the coffee and beignets, but he wanted us frying just a few yards behind the wagon.
We organized our station with mountains of chilled dough that had been shipped in from New Orleans and with aluminum pans of cinnamon sugar and powdered sugar to toss the doughnuts in once they came out of the fryer. The last glimmers of light were disappearing to the west, and just as Harry Connick Jr. finished his encore the fireworks show lit up the sky. A party planner emerged on the scene with Café du Monde–branded aprons and giant T-shirts we awkwardly pulled on over our chefs’ coats. Paper hats, too. We must have looked ridiculous. And by the time the oil was bubbling and our first batch of beignets went out to the stagecoach, people started to leave the party.
We were incredulous that any of these guests had room for a doughnut at this point, but the beignets were popular. And most of these people were savvy enough to spurn the ones the servers had sandbagged on the
station for the rush; they wanted piping-hot beignets, fresh from the fryer. So there was plenty of attention on our frying area, and scrutiny eventually on us. And we enjoyed it. Ted took over the fryer while Matt tonged the beignets into their waxed paper envelopes and dusted them with powdered sugar.
In the backup of people waiting for the hot ones were Alec and Hilaria Baldwin, Ron Howard, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi. And then House minority leader Pelosi jumped the line and started toward us.
“Hello, there!” she said, and Matt smiled, a bit confused. “Yoo-hoo!” she said. Ted looked around, caught the eye of the party planner in the shadows.
Then it hit us. She thought we were members of the Fernandez family, owners of the legendary café, flown in from New Orleans to serve her a beignet—a notion entirely consistent with the concept of this party.
“I was just in New Orleans!” she said. “For the Katrina tenth anniversary!”
We knew the “Always Correct” service rules. Matt had been spoken to, so had license to reply. But what could he say? I’m sorry, you’re mistaken—I’m not from New Orleans, I’m just the kitchen assistant manning the fryer in a Café du Monde T-shirt I put on a half hour ago?
Matt just smiled and nodded. “Beignets, Congresswoman Pelosi? Fresh from the fryer?” And then, as if matters couldn’t get more awkward, a man a few paces behind us shrieked, “Oh. My. GOD!”
She braced herself for an introduction with a broad smile, and for a second we were relieved she’d been collared by a fan—we could get back to frying, flipping, tonging, and sugar dusting. This was the excruciating life these people live: forever in the spotlight, surrounded by total strangers who claim a kind of intimacy in private moments.