Hotbox - Matt Lee Page 0,1

in suboptimal circumstances, both Sotos smiled and shrugged.

“De nada,” Juan said, laughing.

Jorge turned serious. “You gotta understand. For us…? This is fun.”

“We did—what?—eighty covers tonight?” Patrick added. “These guys can do lamb chops for fourteen hundred. I tell them I need three hundred well-done, three hundred rare, eight hundred medium-rare. I tell them what time to serve-out. And I can walk away.”

“It’s not too hard,” Juan said. “You have to know the proofer.”

Patrick explained: the proofer is another word for the hotbox—an upright aluminum cabinet on wheels, lifeblood for caterers—that conveys the partially cooked food from the refrigerator at the caterer’s prep kitchen to the site of the party. So those lamb chops for fourteen hundred would have been seared in advance at the caterer’s prep kitchen, just enough to get perfect coloring on the outside, but more or less raw inside. Then they slide on sheet pans into the proofer. The proofer rolls into a fridge to chill until it’s time to move them onto the truck for the ride to the venue. Once on-site, the hotboxes are emptied and transformed into working ovens, with each sheet pan of lamb placed over other sheet pans that hold only lit cans of Sterno.

“Sterno?” we protested. “Isn’t that for keeping chafing pans of rubber chicken warm on a hotel buffet?”

Not in catering at this level, he explained. All hot event food consumed in New York City gets heated and finished in this way. “The side dishes for that lamb, the quinoa, roasted parsnips, whatever. Even the bread and the plates. All of it comes out of a hotbox.”

“You have to watch,” Juan added, pointing to his eye. “Feel,” he said, rubbing his thumb between his forefingers. “And listen.” He tugged an earlobe. “And organize. Always organize. But if you do, you can get it right.”

We were certain we could not get it right—neither of us has the sensory knowledge, the mettle, or the wits. But the more we listened to these catering pros, the more captivated we were by their strange world of food-crafting-in-the-field, unlike anything we’d ever seen go down in a home or restaurant.

Patrick prodded Juan to tell us a horror story, about the time a hot proofer got too close to a sprinkler head at the New York Public Library and the plating line—food, chef, kitchen assistants—got soaked in a rust-water rain and still managed to serve dinner to three hundred people oblivious to the back-of-house disaster. You had to be cool, calm, and, especially, resourceful, whatever situation you were dealt, whether it was being conscripted from the kitchen to translate Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s Spanish into English for Oliver Stone, or discovering, only at the moment when she stepped into the yacht’s kitchen afterward, that you’d cooked an intimate thirtieth birthday dinner for Kim Kardashian.

Juan and Jorge Soto gathered their bags, said they had to get back to the Bronx. They were facing a 5:00 a.m. call time the next day. Patrick signaled for the check—he was headed back to the prep kitchen to get ahead of two events the following evening.

Walking to the subway, we peppered Patrick with questions, spooling out hypothetical nightmares at a giant party.

“What if all the hotboxes won’t fit on one truck?”

“We rent another.”

“What if two—or ten—chefs don’t show up the night of the party?”

“Won’t happen.”

“What if the truck breaks down on a hot day? Is there ice in the proofer to keep the lamb chops chilled until it’s time to heat them back up?”

“Good question.”

Anyone who cooks professionally knows the first principle of food safety is the danger zone, between 40 degrees and 140 degrees Fahrenheit, within which bacteria such as Clostridium perfringens are happiest and able to multiply exponentially. It’s why you want to keep raw food below 40 degrees until the moment you cook it and cooked food above 140 degrees until it’s time to serve. A common cause of food poisoning is from leftovers that lingered too long at room temperature before they went back in the fridge. This hotbox rigmarole the Sonnier crew had described seemed to add an extra cycle of heating and cooling to the lamb chops, but also another calculus of time and temperature in transporting the food to the venue.

“Look, we’re monitoring our temps every step of the way,” Patrick said. “But I’ll be honest: if you work in catering, you’re gonna spend a lot of time in the danger zone. If you can’t get comfortable in the zone, you won’t survive a