by Matt Lee
Then the same voice said: “What the fuck are the Lee brothers doing here?”
Our cover was blown. It was a friend from grade school we hadn’t seen in at least a decade. There was the House minority leader, with a look of bemusement, maybe a tinge of disappointment. There was the party planner, thoroughly confused, bordering on annoyed. And there was Peter Robbins.
“Want some beignets?” Matt asked him, loath to break character. A bear hug was out of the question. “What are you doing here?”
“We’re the scrappy neighbors they’re obliged to invite,” he said, sotto voce, waving over his wife, Page. “Our house is the falling-down one at the end of the street. Where the security checkpoint is? We’re right there.”
We’d embedded in catering to study how the food gets made and who makes it. And we’d come to a deeper appreciation of how the business works, and of the people who labor in its ranks, from the pot scrubbers to the ace proofers and executive chefs. We’d learned how these insane contemporary food productions came to be, how they function in today’s culture, and the ways in which the invisibility of these kitchens can, paradoxically, grant the people who work them the authority and confidence they need at a challenging fiesta. We remembered the days nearly three years ago that we’d first put on our beanies, chef’s coats, black pants. Giving ourselves up so completely to the starchy, plain K.A. uniform was empowering on a number of levels, but mostly because it rendered us invisible to most of society. Now a guest—Peter—was addressing us for our selves rather than as the K.A.s at the fryer. He’d pierced the veil. We felt bared in that awkward moment but also strangely liberated. The more seconds that ticked past with our small talk, the more it held up our process, and we itched to get back to catering. We had guests awaiting hot beignets, people who needed our services. And we were eager for this gig to be over, so we could begin telling the story.
* * *
It was nearing midnight by the time Juan Soto circled back from the off-site parking lot with the van. The coastal route was empty, and we made good time getting back to the highway. The van was silent for a while and when we looped around the on ramp to the expressway, Jorge called over from the passenger seat, “Polìcia, Juan.”
“Si, si,” Juan said, and let off the gas a bit.
Juan cranked the A/C high to keep himself awake, so the K.A.s wore their chef coats like blankets and stuffed the vents overhead with dishrags. In time, we passed a similar white passenger van, whose driver turned on its interior light as an acknowledgment and greeting: are you our crew? We saw the bright white shirts of a catering team inside the other van and Juan turned on our van’s interior lights, causing a few protests from K.A.s in the back who had nodded off.
“Not our guys,” Juan said. And then both vans’ interiors went dark again.
In a few minutes, the same semaphore exchange with a different white van happened. And then again, another. All along the expressway, the people who don’t speak unless spoken to, and who cook, and serve, and make the ugly stuff disappear after the meal, were headed back to their catering kitchens, and, after that, to their homes, for a few hours of rest before the next shift.
Acknowledgments
We offer our deepest thanks to those who set this book in motion and propelled us forward, including Peter Milewicz, the first caterer we ever met, whose cheese croustades are still our favorite canapé; Amanda Hesser, who hired us to report the column The Industry for the New York Times Magazine; Patrick Phelan, Jorge Soto, and Juan Soto, who graciously welcomed us into their lives and who framed our entire experience in catering. And to Biz Mitchell, Vance Muse, Jaime Wolf, Andy McNicol, our agent, and Gillian Blake, our editor, who encouraged our detour from cookbooks to write about the traveling food world. Their insights and patient guidance were invaluable.
We are eternally grateful to the professionals who labored alongside us in the prep kitchen and at fiestas, generously sharing expertise while enduring our slow pace and unsure hands, including Michael Alge, Lucy Astudillo, Matt Bishop, Marilu Cantor, Manuel Cruz, Isabelle Donovan, Matt Greene, Brian “Patches” Holbach, Danita Holt, Steve Jackson, Saori Kurioka, Bethany Morey, Pam Naraine, Ryan Ostrander, Roxana Paredes, Wilmer Rodriguez, Ian Rynecki, Jhovany León Salazar, Christian Sibucao, Casey Wilson, Gustavo Zepeda, and many others.
Our heartfelt gratitude goes to the catering-industry veterans whose stories and knowledge put our field experiences into context, including David Castle and Russ Sonnier, Collin Barnard, Ronnie Davis, Sean Driscoll (R.I.P.), Megan Fitzroy-Phelan, Bobby Flay, Sara Foster, Robb Garceau, T. J. Girard, Meg Gleason, John Harenda, Susan Holland, Tyler Johnson, John Karangis, Bronwyn Keenan, Anita Lo, Mark Maynard-Parisi, Jim McManus, Danny Meyer, David Monn, Jean-Claude Nédélec, Paul Neuman, Liz Neumark, Yann Nury, Eric Ripert, Gina Rogak, Bob Spiegel, Mimi Van Wyck, and Steve Wenger.
Endless thanks also to Elliott Holt, Sarah Gray Miller, Ryan Smernoff, and Caroline Wray, whose readings helped keep us on track and strengthened the manuscript. We thank Lauren Nassef for her chapter illustrations of the world behind the pipe and drape, and Pat Eisemann, Carolyn O’Keefe, Libby Burton, and all the staff at Henry Holt who have helped nudge this book into being.
Last, but not least, we acknowledge our stalwart cheering section, Liza and Will Lee, Caroline Lee and Mike Nees, and the home team, E. V. Day, Gia Papini Lee, and the littler Lee brothers, Arthur, Lorenzo, and George, who endured our many absences over the years.
Notes
Introduction
1 Ordered by the executive chef, a return trip of the truck to the prep kitchen to pick up something that’s been either left behind or hopelessly lost at the site.
2 A tall but compact four-sided metal stand on casters, for holding and moving large numbers of completed plates.
Chapter 1: Manchego Mayhem
1 “Brioche” is the kindest word for this favored delivery platform—a thin toast-cracker.
2 The caterer’s on-site crew in charge of miscellaneous tasks including rentals distribution at the beginning of the night, setting up the coffee percolators, and handling all refuse removal at the end of the evening.
3 By the end of your first few parties, after ripping open a hundred triple-wrapped bundles, you get a precise feel for the tolerances and breaking points of industrial-strength plastic wrap.
4 “Trash?”
5 The dining room, in cater-speak.
6 A plated dish that’s already waiting at each guest’s place when they sit down to dinner. This is a pro move, merciful to guest and staff alike, shaving at least a half hour off the event. But the food must be designed to survive an hour or more at room temperature with texture and flavor intact.
7 Close cousin to “brioche toast.”
Chapter 2: Not the Sharpest Knife in the Drawer
1 And yet some exceptional beings, like Juan and Jorge Soto, are able to perform well under these circumstances. If possible, they catch a 3:30 p.m. catnap in their car if they reach the fiesta site early.
2 Moisture retention is better with bone-in meat, resulting in a higher yield despite the bone waste!
Chapter 3: The Client Is (Almost) Always Right
1 A stainless-steel pan about four inches deep, for storage, transport, and serving from at a buffet.
2 Among the first nontraditional event venues in New York City, opened in 1978, it became synonymous with conspicuous-consumption parties of the eighties after the 1987 Tisch-Steinberg wedding, a $3 million affair (roughly $7 million today, adjusted for inflation).
Chapter 4: Fiesta in the Palace
1 Cocktail reception and dinner (seated, plated); CR & BD is cocktail reception and buffet dinner.
2 Not printed on the menu; offered to guests only upon request.
3 Alas, this wasn’t a vegetarian crowd; the yams were never called for.
4 Miniature
finger desserts typically presented as a gift from the chef and served after the dessert course, along with any coffees.
5 I was earning $25 an hour for my labors that evening.
6 The place in a kitchen where completed dishes are presented to be picked up by servers and delivered to diners.
Chapter 5: The Telephone Chef, the Glorious Guys, and G.I. Joe Veterans Frankfurter Service
1 In “French-style” service, a large platter of food is brought to a table by a waiter with serving utensils, who serves each person in turn from the platter (as opposed to the food being pre-plated and the plate simply dropped in front of the guest).
2 Then and now considered among the top culinary schools in the world.
3 The same man who would, in the late 1970s, become the founding chef of Windows on the World, the marquee restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center.
4 The cold, too—a hotbox loaded with sheet pans of crushed dry ice can be used to keep desserts cool.
5 In 1998, Glorious Foods settled a class-action discrimination suit brought against them by women waiters, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
6 It is rumored the comedian Bronson Pinchot, who worked as a Glorious Food waiter, based the character he plays in the movie Beverly Hills Cop, the art dealer Serge, on DeCluny.
7 Which is pretty close to the New York average for an event when all expenses, including decor and rentals, have been factored in.
8 Whose seventieth birthday party, in 2017, for five hundred guests in Palm Beach, was widely reported to have cost $5 million, or $10,000 per guest.
Chapter 6: Dinner in Light and Dark
1 Fiesta workers, largely of Mexican and other Central American descent, booked through Juan.
2 “The Three Davids,” in New York City, refers to three designers, all competing for the same high-end, high-concept business: David Beahm, David Monn, and David Stark.
3 “Phelan gives no quarter to superfluous vocals or disorganized arrangements. He lays out his quietly dissonant melodies in transparent, sequential lines, and his vocals—stoically emotive and unapologetically human—become the centerpiece of any song they inhabit.”—Brian Howe, Pitchfork, March 22, 2006.
4 Expedite: in a restaurant, the expediter hands a completed plate from the kitchen off to the waitstaff to deliver to the table.
5 A term of endearment he used with all his charges that literally means “resident of Mexico City.”
6 Also called a “confectionery funnel.”
Chapter 7: The Big Pink Hippo
1 In the fog of war that follows an event, ownership of unmarked items especially can become unclear.
2 The turned-stick style of side chair invented in the Italian town of the same name in the early 1800s and dominant in the events business ever since. It’s stackable, and the overbuilt, ladderlike construction makes it especially sturdy and durable.
Chapter 8: Sixteen Hundred Deviled Eggs
1 “I think this platform may have been too small for Neal,” one partner was quoted as saying.
2 The noun “proofer” is used by the Soto brothers to describe the hotbox and also any fiesta K.A.s entrusted with operating one.
Chapter 11: Great Expectations
1 Neumark’s father, committing a Freudian slip par excellence, wrote the check out to “Great Expectations.”
2 Neumark learned, much to her chagrin, that New York hostesses in the early eighties stubbornly preferred male bartenders.
3 This was the eighties, after all.
4 Among its members was a college student named Robert M. Parker Jr., who would later find fame as the most polarizing wine critic in the world.
5 Lalli would become editor in chief of Food & Wine magazine, an editor at the book publisher Simon & Schuster, and caterer Liz Neumark’s collaborator on the cookbook Sylvia’s Table.
6 “Catering and events was a magnet for young gay men in the arts, because it was the perfect freelance work, and the community was devastated in the way that all arts-heavy communities were. I had twenty friends; sixteen of them died,” said party planner Susan Holland.
ALSO BY MATT LEE AND TED LEE
The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen
The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern
The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook
About the Authors
MATT LEE and TED LEE are the authors of several bestselling cookbooks: The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern, and The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen. They have written for the New York Times, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, the New York Times Magazine, and Saveur and have appeared on many TV shows, including Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and the Cooking Channel’s Unique Eats. Their cookbooks have won two James Beard and four IACP awards. You can sign up for email updates here.
Sign up for email updates on Ted Lee here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1. Manchego Mayhem
2. Not the Sharpest Knife in the Drawer
SIDEBAR: PREP FACTS
3. The Client Is (Almost) Always Right
4. Fiesta in the Palace
5. The Telephone Chef, the Glorious Guys, and G.I. Joe Veterans Frankfurter Service
6. Dinner in Light and Dark
SIDEBAR: SHEET PAN MAGIC
7. The Big Pink Hippo
SIDEBAR: GLASS FACTS
8. Sixteen Hundred Deviled Eggs
SIDEBAR: WORKING THE HOTBOX
9. Can I Even Eat This?
10. No Milk! (Butter and Cream Okay)
11. Great Expectations
RECIPE: BATHTUB PASTA SALAD
12. The Happy Couple Fancied Themselves Food Curators
SIDEBAR: NUPTIALS BY THE NUMBERS
13. Piercing the Veil
Acknowledgments
Notes
Also by Matt Lee and Ted Lee
About the Authors
Copyright
HOTBOX. Copyright © 2019 by Matt Lee and Ted Lee. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover illustrations by Lauren Nassef
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Lee, Matt (Cookbook author), author.|Lee, Ted, author.
Title: Hotbox: inside catering, the food world’s riskiest business / Matt Lee and Ted Lee.
Description: First edition.|New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018035756|ISBN 9781627792615 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Caterers and catering—Management.
Classification: LCC TX921 .L44 2019|DDC 642/.4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035756
e-ISBN 9781627792622
First Edition: April 2019
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
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