Hotbox - Matt Lee Page 0,2

day on the job. Next question.”

We had so many more questions for Patrick, and that’s how we ended up in his prep kitchen.

* * *

Even if you’ve never been a guest at Kim’s birthday party or a charity gala for fourteen hundred New York swells, likelier than not you’ve attended a catered event: a wedding, a holiday party, a quinceañera, a reception. Maybe you wondered how it all came together: What’s happening behind that black curtain? The thought might have been sparked by a moment as fleeting as seeing a server strain to lift a chafing dish (and may have disappeared just as quickly, your mind drifting back to your grandmother shuffling around the dance floor). You measure a party’s success, ultimately, by how much it focuses attention on the enjoyment of celebrants and guests, by its apparent effortlessness. Obscuring all toil, and especially the stories of the people who made the occasion happen, is the caterer’s ultimate goal.

But not ours.

In Hotbox, we’re taking you with us behind the pipe and drape—trade lingo for that black curtain—into a world engineered never to be seen, populated by individuals you’re never meant to hear from, performing deeds you can’t help being curious about (even if you kinda don’t want to know). In truth, our early analogy—the Special Ops team—was underdeveloped since that night at the James Beard House our Atlanta restaurant pals had made things easier: they brought the prepped rabbit and oxtail, and their kitchen was a fully equipped location with its own refrigerators and natural gas–powered ovens. Hot and cold running water! Event caterers aren’t just chefs, they’re haulers and builders, too, since they’re not only transporting the food to a remote spot, but also fashioning a kitchen out of thin air (oftentimes on sites as blank as a grass field or a cement loading dock), and there’s rarely ever running water. As such, they have more in common with MASH, a mobile army surgical hospital, than Special Operations—or a restaurant, for that matter. The tent campaign of loading and unloading the kitchen infrastructure and the delicate, squishy food involves so much travel, a factor that rarely disturbs the tight calculations of a restaurant chef, comfortable in her own familiar kitchen. In “off-premise” catering (as distinguished from banquet-hall catering or corporate cafeterias), there’s the expanse of actual miles—over minutes—the food must traverse: packed from the prep kitchen into rolling hotboxes, coolers, milk crates, and plastic bins, and onto the box truck for the journey to the venue; then unloaded from the truck onto elevators or carried up staircases to whatever hall or back room is designated the “kitchen.” Just as important, there is also the cognitive distance separating the minds of the kitchen prep crew that par-cooked and packed the food from those on the team receiving it in their makeshift party kitchen, unwrapping and setting up everything, finding every item—or not, forcing the dreaded (and inevitable) re-run.1 And lastly, there are the servers, the cater waiters, those warm bodies from staffing agencies, typically freelancers who may work for a handful of competing firms from one night to the next, entrusted with moving and handling the food once it’s left the kitchen, to be presented to the guest. With rare exceptions, a catering chef hands his food to a total stranger.

All this discontinuity and travel geometrically multiplies the hazards standing in the way of a catering chef aiming to serve what was originally intended, that perfect plate, whose stunning flavors and stylish presentation clinched the deal at the client tasting many months prior. And in this context, time becomes a presence as tangible, fungible, and daunting as the weather—more so when the scale of the event is factored into the equation. While an epic fail at a restaurant table might cost the house a few customers, when there are eight hundred hungry guests on the event floor waiting for dinner to be served, havoc-wreaking scenarios—an electrical brownout blows power to the fryers and the stage lights; the host’s toast runs twenty minutes too long, condemning the lamb to overcooked toughness; a server faints and takes down with him a jack stand2 of 120 plated desserts—may become apparent only at the moment they happen, and have greater consequences.

True, the stakes for the caterer are not nearly as high as for the army surgeon, but the vast majority of events that top New York firms cater to are pretty significant—charity galas, weddings, product launches, milestone birthdays, annual board meetings, political debuts, and