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Sunday, January 26 just my life
Let me tell you something of what it’s like to make a living as a wedding caterer. I used to think of catering as the enemy of my writing career. Sure it paid the bills, but it always left me so burnt out that there was nothing left inside me when it came time to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Then I made an amazing discovery! The mad, manic, neurotic often-psychotic world of catering is primo writing material. Throw in that 90% of my business is catering weddings and you’ve got some killer ingredients for an inspiration stew. Plus there’s this handy little bonus. The fact that I come home from an event wired like a valley girl on a Coke binge makes for great late night writing spree. You just can’t come down from feeding two hundred people without a slow letting off of steam. Hence the 2 AM. writing. But enough about writing. Let’s talk about this thing called wedding catering. How about if I just walk you through my last two days. Friday morning started with me attempting to answer all the phone inquiries that had come in Thursday night before taking a car service to my kitchen in Long Island City. I called back two bar mitzvah moms, three brides and one set of in-laws, then I picked up bagels and Coke (the soda kind) for my kitchen crew and hopped a car to the 59th street bridge. Bagels and Coca Cola are a must for pro cooks. Ask anyone. Second only to strong coffee and cigarettes. I got a call on my cell phone on the way over the bridge, the board of health was sending an inspector and everyone was scurrying around looking for the slightest thing that could be remotely deemed a violation. Lately, perhaps because New York needs the cash, it’s seemed like the inspectors refuse to leave without finding something, however minor, to fine you over. On their last visit, they picked through about a hundred or so cans in my dry storage section and found one that had a dent that could only be seen by a micro-scope and gave me a $300 dollar fine. Anyway, I must say, we run a meticulous kitchen, I’ve got the raw hands from a thousand washes to prove it, but nevertheless, today was deemed obsessive compulsive day in honor of the impending inspection. When I walked into our warehouse kitchen I found Neil (my chef) pacing back and forth by the walk-in looking at the clock and repeating his typical Friday morning mantra, “Where is he? Where is he?” He… is the meat/fish man who has the best product for the best price but is always, always late. “We’ve got nothing to do till he gets here. Nothing!’ “Hmmm,” I say in my subtle..Oh really well what about these bazillion little things, voice, “I’m sure there are a few things we can do.” Miha (my part-time chef) was smiling and cutting up cheese for tomorrow’s cheese table. “Relax….everything is fine…life is fine,” he says in his Slovakian accent. Miha can be happy in that strange way of truly spiritual people, or serial killers. I push my mess of hair under a bandana and put on a chef jacket that I swim in like a giant mu mu . As we had once asked for a few extra large chef jackets, the linen company has obviously decided that we should have nothing but elephant sized jackets ever after. I feel like a little kid wearing her mommy’s coat. So we get into it. I start a cilantro chutney. Miha rolls goat cheese in herbs and pepper. Neil takes in the deliveries and complains Alethia our Ecuadorian dishwasher/ prep person, smiles, cleans parsley and goes into her secret little place in which she will be lost in her far away thoughts for hours on end. Periodically she looks at us and says in her little bit of English, “Ya Ya…Ya.” The meat and fish finally show up. Mike apologizes and says what he always says, “Traffic on the bridge.” Neil and Miha spend the next 2 hours, cutting chicken scaling salmon, roasting bones for chicken stock, slicing sushi tuna into logs to be seared tomorrow and talking about sex. Kitchen folks talk about three things consistently; sex, food and bowel movements. This does not necessarily occur in this order but it always occurs. Other subjects are what I call subtexts of these three; comparing food items to penis’s or vaginas, what other chefs are doing that we hate and fart jokes. Brian, the chef from the company we share our kitchen with who does food for a college commissary, is walking around with his long blonde rock&roll hair shoved into a hair net. “You look like a freak,” I tell him trying to be complimentary. “Yeah dude,” he replies. In a period of about 7 hours we have gotten through the day’s prep. Dips and sauces made, meat and fish butchered, stock drained and chilling, herbs washed, chickpeas soaking. It’s a light day for us. It’s rush hour so no car service for us. We bundle up and take the 7 train into Manhattan. Once home, I pour myself a glass of chardonnay, soak in a hot bath, answer a dozen phone calls and another dozen emails, order up Chinese food and throw myself in front of the television. The nervousness for the day before a wedding I’m about to cater begins to creep in. Even after 12 years and hundreds of weddings I still get performance anxiety. Being a wedding caterer is a truly bizarre way to make a living. As prostitutes are to sex, wedding industry folks are to romance. I’m in the business of romance. When I see a wedding gown I don’t think ever-lasting love. I think time to punch the clock. Lord help me when it’s time for me to get hitched. I think I’ll just take a hundred of my best pals to the local McDonalds. There are a lot of things I love about being a wedding caterer. I love making beautiful food. I love the adoration and appreciation or my clients. I love making big wads of cash. But the thing is I hate, is that even though almost all of my business comes from word-of-mouth, even though I’ve had great press , even though I do tastings for my clients, even though I’ve catered hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of weddings. I still get that night-before-the-wedding terrified message on my answering machine. “Ummm Chef Rossi…this is the bride’s mother. I just want to make sure everything is okay. You do remember that you’re catering my daughter’s wedding tomorrow?” No. I forgot. Sheeesh. Every time I cater a wedding it’s the fist time ( or occasionally the second, maybe third) the client is getting married. Either the bride-to-be spends the entire year before the wedding calling me up worried that I will some-how ruin her wedding or her mom does or the groom does or the groom’s mom. Or no one does until the week of the wedding and suddenly my phone is ringing off the hook with terrified calls, “what happens if you run out of food? Do you have enough staff? Will it rain? Is my menu okay? “ You name it. Pre-wedding jitters are one-way ticket to a terrorized caterer. I just try to take deep breaths and sound soothing. What I want to say is. “Take a %$#&* Valium for crying out loud.” I learned a valuable lesson some years back from a mom-of-a-bride that so terrorized me I was ready to ask her to take herself and her daughter and her 15,000 bucks and go elsewhere. “Do you know what I do for a living?” she asked. “No.” “I’m a heart surgeon.” “Uh Huh.” “I’ve done hundreds of open heart surgeries. Used to have the bedside manner of an army captain. One day as we were wheeling a nervous man towards surgery, he grabbed my arm and said. Doctor. Please, this may be your thousandth open-heart surgery but it’s my first…..be kind. So that’s what I’m saying to you. This may be your thousandth wedding, but it’s my only daughter’s first.” I got the point. Been careful to keep my bedside manner kindly ever since. Saturday morning begins as all my pre-wedding mornings do; with a huge cup of lethally strong coffee and a banana chaser. I take out the menu and make my food and equipment packing list. I always say it’s the little things that make a great caterer. Sure. Most caterers can make good food, but how many remember to pack the saran wrap, cocktail napkins and pickled ginger? My packing list would make NASA jealous. The normal items might be: The Unusual might be: I pick up coffee for the crew and head over the bridge. Once in the kitchen Neil and Miha are in full crank mode. Neil is roasting chicken. Alethia is slicing baguettes for the cheese table. Everything is being done at jet speed. I imagine to an outsider we must look like a film playing on fast speed, but to us it’s the usual pre-wedding motion. As long as we don’t sit down or eat anything heavy, we can maintain this speed for up to 10 hours without stopping. I pull out 6 white lugs and start packing. Cheese and fruit in the cheese table lug Within three hours the pre-party prep is done. Peter my Ecuadorian driver has arrived with the refrigerated van and is loading up the lugs with his usual song no one has ever heard of in his head that he hums all day long. We put our dirty gigantic chef jackets in the laundry bag and change into clean gigantic jackets. The we all cram into the van like the Beverly Hillbilly’s and head off to the party. “Did you remember the foil?” Neil asks like he always does. “Yeah!” “The saran?’ “Yeah.”
“No!” We unload into the freight elevator at the party location, a turn-of-century factory turned into a Soho loft. Carlos the Ecuadorian (catching a trend here?) building manager politely helps us load in. “Come on! Hurry up! Hurry up! I got shit to do!” On the top floor, where the party is I find Margot my maitre d/ party captain. She has that look on her face that can only be read as “Someone is pissing me off big time!” Turns out it’s the client’s florist who has decided to hang curtains in a way that block the heat from circulating around the room so that the kitchen feels like Miami and the ceremony area feels like Siberia. The florist has also managed to place votive candles directly under her flower arrangements so that a tiny fire starts on one of the café tables. As if this is not a great enough start, she waits until Margot has the waiters roll 100 sets up silverware into ivory napkins before telling Margot that she has special red napkins for this purpose. I attempt to take advantage of the fact that I pay Margot very well for taking care of this kind of bull-doody and ignore the entire situation. In the kitchen Miha and Neil work on getting all the perishables organized and in the fridge. I take over setting up the 8-foot cheese table and Armando our Ecuadorian dish washer (what can I say, I’m the Ecuadorian Mother Teresa)..scrubs down the work tables. In the next two hours I set up a country style cheese table for 150 guests with enough food on it to feed 300 guests. Miha and Neil get the hors d’oeuvres ready and the guests, as always arrive a half hour early. The wedding ceremony is lovely, as always, the guests devour the cheese table like they haven’t eaten in a decade, like usual and we get into our rhythm. For the next hour we crank out hors d’oeuvres. I yell at the waiters to clean the trays which they never seem to do and Ira, our waiter in charge of letting us know what everyone in the entire room is saying and doing comes in to report to us, how many of the guests are gay, how many are fat, who is a pig, what they think of the food and what he thinks of the brides’ outfit. “Thanks Ira…now shut the fuck up….” I answer like always. There are 6 wedding guests stationed at the door to the kitchen who refuse to move and refuse to let the waiters get past them until they grab handfuls of everything on their trays. “Um we do have to get to the other guests,” one of the waiters says politely. “Shrimp….bring more shrimp!” they scream at him in answer. The waiters have to resort to battle mode after this. One waiter goes in front to make way and the other waiter with his tray up high over his head pushes past the rude people and gets to the guests in the back. Fran, the waiter (we don’t say waitress even if they’re a woman) waits for Neil to pile some vegetable samosas on her tray. She takes this opportunity to needle me as she always does, “So what’s up your ass today? Got your period? You wanna take this outside?” “Oy vey already!,” I say to her, “Shut up and eat something!” After the cocktail hour ends. Half the waiters start pouring champagne for the toast, the other half break down the cheese table and bring it into the kitchen. We now have 30 minutes to be ready for dinner. I lay the sides of pepper roasted salmon on the fish tray and Miha decorates them with marinated cucumbers and tomatoes. He then piles an herb mixture of scallion, parsley and chervil on top of the fish. Neil rotates the chicken and asparagus so it’s all hot and I begin on cous cous mountain. This entails taking a Moroccan brass tray about the size of a Manhattan studio apartment and piling it with cous cous until I have something out of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (I know, I know, before your time), then sprinkling white raisins, almonds, cashews,apricots, figs and parsley on top. It takes two of our butchest waiters to bring it out. In 29 minutes we are ready; salmon, chicken, cous cous, asparagus, chick pea salad, baby lettuce salad, bread and butter all out. Just in time for stampede the likes of which I haven’t seen since my last western flick. “Look ! The buffet is open!” screams one of those same 6 people who tried to eat hors d’ oeuvres for 150. You gotta wonder what these people do in their normal lives. Do they not eat for two or three days before a wedding? Everytime I look out at the buffet Ira manages to give me the “what the fuck look”. Jeremy (Ira’s boyfriend) smiles his wide toothy smile and giggles every time Ira makes the face. We’ve got a happy crew….a happy crew of New York City bitchy waiters. That’s pretty much the best you can do in this biz. There aren’t too many hitches in the dinner hour. A few old ladies who refuse to get up despite the fact that this is a buffet and have to have their meals brought to them. A few more near fire hazards by the florists candle placement. Nothing we can’t handle. Armando our dishman receives a call from his cell phone,(even the dishwashers have cell phones these days) and disappears for an hour. “Either a woman or a drug deal,” I say to Neil’s puzzled face. Margot comes in for refills on salad and salmon. “That florist was trying to boss me around..Can you imagine? I said listen honey I’ve been running these weddings for 12 years how long have you been around? ” “You go girl,” I say smiling knowing exactly what happens to the silly mortals who try to boss Margot around. We break down half of the double-sided buffet and leave one half up for the guests resolved to come back for seconds and thirds. I turn the food brought in, into a staff meal and Margot begins to break the staff a few at a time to eat. Alex, the bartender who’s been bored out of his head because none of the guests want anything more interesting than a screwdriver, piles his plates high with chicken. “No red meat?” he asks sadly. Alex is a big Irish guy from Queens. He lives for red meat. “Sorry big boy.” Alex has arrived in the kitchen just in time to settle a debate I’m having with Miha. Miha has informed me that the average male penis is 8 inches when soft. I haven’t had many male penises (many female ones though) but I tell him I’m pretty sure its more like 6. “Alex!! What’s the average size for a penis?” I ask. “Ummm.. 6 inches I think. Why do you want one?” “I guess it’s just what I’m used to after all I’m a lucky, lucky boy.” Miha jokes. Having taken on the obligatory penis part of the conversation we move into bowel movements and I explain what parts of the buffet will be constipating and what parts loosening. Neil pushes the soy mayo out of a squirt bottle into the garbage. It makes a noise that sounds, well appropriate for this part of the conversation. “Excuse me,” he says and we both laugh. After we have fed all the guests at least once and some of them three times, the buffet is broken down. The florist who is noticeably drunk comes into the kitchen to eat from the staff meal. She is halfway thru her meal before I notice she isn’t using silverware. “Here’s a fork,” I offer. “thanks.” We put enough food on the staff table to feed the 6 waiters that haven’t eaten yet and Neil and Miha start packing up a bridal box with enough goodies for them to have another mini party for 30 of their best pals. Ira comes in the kitchen to eat. “Did you see that one who tried to eat the garnish? I was like lady that’s a flower.” I line up 12 assorted trays and bowls on the back table and Miha begins making cookie and pastry displays for the dessert buffet. Armando our dishman finally returns. He has a silly look on his face. When I ask him where he has been, he reminds me doesn’t speak English and asks for a “Servesa” (beer). We hear the bandleader announce that its time to cut the cake, even though it wasn’t actually time to cut the cake and hurriedly clear off our worktable, put cutting boards and knifes on the table and the cake plates. The cake comes in. We take the top layer off to save for the bride and groom and Neil and Miha start slicing the rest. Slicing it, thanks to a thick, greasy, somewhat melted butter cream icing, is a gooey mess and it is, (natch) exactly at this moment, that the party locations runs out of hot water. There is nothing short of gasoline that will get the melted butter cream off our fingers. After three washes I give up and prepare to spend the rest of my life with butter fingers. The150 wedding guests that have eaten food for 250, devour the baby pastry and cookie displays and still have plenty of room for cake. Ira comes in the kitchen, “Did you see the guy who tried to eat rose petals. I was like Mista….I don’t think you should be doing that.” It’s always at the cake cutting time,that I begin to ponder whether or not the client is as happy as I hope they are. Just as the thought crosses my mind, the bride comes in. She looks almost amazingly beautiful. Her entire face seems to be smiling. She kisses me on the cheek. “Thank you for everything! It was just perfect!” I feel my face turning red. I love the compliments but they still embarrass me. “Hey I’m not done with you yet,” I answer and we show her the bridal box. “Oh my god!” she giggles, “My mom will love this.” After the bride leaves it’s the anti-climax part of the evening. We came, we saw, we fed the masses and now there’s a big ass mess to haul back to the kitchen. Luckily for moi, this is the one part of the business that I can completely delegate. I call up a car service for myself and leave Miha and Neil to deal with taking our stuff back to the kitchen. I take off my chef jacket dress, throw into a lug, grab my gear and head out for my car, on the way I pass Fran on the dessert buffet. She can’t pass up one last opportunity to give it to me. “You outa here already….miss premenstrual.” “Shut-up-already.” I answer. I pass Alex at the bar… “If 8 inches is the average I’m in trouble,” “Hey Alex..you know what they say…it’s not the meat…” In the elevator I yell to Carlos. “Adios Carlito!” He yells back, “Get the fuck outa here! I’m busy!”
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