Hotbox - Matt Lee Page 0,3

movie premieres in one of the biggest, richest, most competitive cities in the world. As the minutes tick down to the serve-out of the first hors d’oeuvre, there’s more at risk than just the hundreds of thousands of dollars a client may have spent on the evening’s food, booze, and labor; there are the emotions of a bride and groom on their big day, the reputation of a top movie studio, or the longevity of an esteemed, hundred-year-old nonprofit. There are the memories of people celebrating some of the most momentous nights of their lives.

Considering all that these catering chefs are up against, and regularly conquer—their nerve-rattling tightrope sprints through A-list celebrity territory, the exquisite food torture, a season’s worth of MacGyver-y kitchen rescues that throw propriety, food safety, and convention out the door because “we have to make this work right now!”—the fact that they don’t get the attention or respect afforded restaurant chefs is astonishing. There’s no James Beard Award for them, yet the food that catering chefs create is often every bit as succulent and dazzling as what’s served at the gastronomic temples of the nation. And they’re cooking with handicaps a restaurant chef couldn’t fathom.

This book is our report from having steeped in the culture of catering and special events for four years, getting to know the business from the inside out, what makes it work, and what kinds of people choose to dwell in it. While reporting and writing this book, we worked as kitchen assistants, prep and party chefs for catering firms in New York City and in Charleston, South Carolina. We researched the business and its history extensively, and interviewed everyone we could: the denizens of catering kitchens, the chefs, and the kitchen assistants, or “K.A.s,” but also workers and leaders in every corner of special events, from the founders of influential catering firms, to salespeople who sell the menus, to the supporting industries, like lighting and rentals, to the party planners and event directors for whom catering is just one of a constellation of services they’re buying that adds up to a special event. It’s a realm where you find remarkable, often downright eccentric characters, working in extreme conditions, under insane stress, with the highest of expectations, mostly in lamentable spaces. Their goal is to make tonight appear special and intimate, unique and ephemeral. And then they do it again the very next day.

When we were working as catering kitchen assistants, most of our colleagues were aware we were studying the industry, taking mental notes. It didn’t seem to raise suspicions or matter much to the boots on the ground—except insofar as we were slow working and green: how you perform is everything to your character in catering. As for the people in the executive suite upstairs, they were a bit more circumspect, but ultimately cool with us working there as well. The catering business depends upon eager, nimble workers, and especially embraces ones inquisitive about the best way to get the job done. And when you’re comfortable employing a kitchen brimming with mercenaries, who flow almost seamlessly from firm to firm, you’re necessarily less concerned with revealing institutional secrets. Our usual journalistic strategy always has the two of us collaborating and doubling up on any interview or experience, but for this project we mostly worked different days in the prep kitchen and in the evenings, as our assigning chefs dictated. Sometimes we worked the same gig on different parts of the job; other times, we were across the prep table from each other. We shared our field notes, photographs, and thoughts with each other on a daily basis and we worked so many hours on so many similar assignments, for the same firms, that our observations and discoveries overlapped and became interchangeable.

To avoid shifting points of view, we adopt a first-person singular perspective—you could call it the royal “I”—throughout the book, calling out which brother is narrating at the head of each chapter, even if the other brother’s experiences may have informed it. And while that might seem odd, it’s actually quite natural: most people we encountered in catering thought we were the same person due to our similar age, build, baldness, and skill level. (We’re brothers, but not twins.) And in fact our kitchen nicknames, conferred by a lead chef in that absurdist way sobriquets typically are, were the same: “Virginia.” (He knew we were from the South, and he’d cooked there once, at a wedding near Richmond.) When it’s