Some readers have expressed interest in the behind-the-scenes aspect of catering—the conversations between Rosencranz and Guildenstern that go on while Hamlet is performed. This piece is from notes I wrote after a party that took place in Northern New Jersey the summer of 2002. I was on the job for more than 16 hours. The scenes are joyous to look back on, partly because they have a crazy, fever dream quality, filled with the tender regard people have for one another when there's work to do that must be done. Describing the details of a party is a form of nature writing or travel writing, it occurs to me, where physical detail does nearly all the work of telling a story.
I just watched season two of the streaming show The Bear (Hulu), about a group of people working to create a great restaurant. What is a great restaurant? It’s a place, like the museum, that is what Richard would call a “heterotopia.” Why am I using a word I don’t exactly know the meaning of? According to Richard, according to Foucault, heterotopias are places that are themselves singular but refer to all other places. In the case of a museum, the things a museum exhibits are samples of everything else in the world. I’m thinking a great restaurant is a place that refers—through food, the collective hum of the kitchen staff, the wait staff, the purveyors of the raw ingredients, etc.—to all other forms of service with the goal of providing pleasure. That’s as true of a bodega as a high-end restaurant. I’m thinking about the reward to the person who performs the service of providing pleasure. I’m thinking writing is another heterotopia that refers to all other things and also has the aim of providing pleasure. Or else how else to keep you at the table?
Upcoming Zoom gatherings.
Richard and I are planning the next Zoom event for PAID subscribers. We will pick another weekend afternoon day and time. Everyone who came to the first gathering is welcome to attend the second gathering to talk about craft and the publishing world. After this gathering, we are thinking of hosting smaller groups of 15 to write together in real time and then read aloud the pieces in slam fashion—this is a workshop format we’ve hosted many times over the years, and it’s super fun. If you would like to attend, this might be a good time to begin a paid subscription.
There are three buttons at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” Your involvement has been a boon, and I am very grateful. The stack has nearly 5000 subscribers.
The Annals of Catering
We gathered at noon and piled into a van. The house was in northern New Jersey, on top of a hill. Beside the house was a massive garage, and flagstone walks zigzagged the grounds. One wing of the house contained a gleaming gym and a state-of-the-art squash court. The floors were white marble. The pool was built of stones and designed to suggest a grotto, with a lit waterfall turned on and off with a switch. Beside the pool was a grill pit large enough to cook a cow.
It was the 56th birthday of the host, who was friendly because it was his nature and because why not, said a face weathered from late nights and fringed with chestnut hair. He greeted us in his bathing suit, a trim man, who lounged at the pool as we set things up.
The party was an annual event, and each year the host chose a different rock and roll theme. In the garage, a slim-faced Elvis looked down at the Jaguar and the Bentley parked underneath him. Last year the Temptations—or what was left of the Temptations—had performed. This year the Duprees, a male quartet around the age of the host, were booked to appear.
My first job was double boxing four sets of six-foot tables that banked the pool. You have to make a boxed table look like a present, and to do this, you have to fold the cloth with a kind of origami technique, which takes practice, because there can’t be any wrinkles on the top, or else glasses will topple over.
Everything at parties looks perfect for the first few minutes. About perfection, the host was philosophical. At the party, he wore a light, salmon-colored suit, and at one point I noticed a large wet stain on the front of his pants that wasn’t going to dry well. Still, he danced on.
At four we got dressed. The look was bistro: white T-shirts (to absorb sweat) under white, long-sleeved shirts, black tux pants, black dress shoes, long black ties and long white aprons that extended to our ankles. I wore sunglasses. In the kitchen, Jim, the head chef, said I could wear them while the sun was out. He was round, as most chefs are, and he smiled, as most chefs do not. Buzzing around him were eight sous chefs, preparing joints of meat for the barbecue and mountains of quesadillas, among many other dishes. I said to Jim, “You are unusually collegial for a chef.” He looked up from the cilantro he was chopping and said, “Years and years of therapy.”
My assignment was the raw bar, located on a patio up a flight of steps. It was shaded by two large umbrellas, and it consisted of two, five-foot long beds of shaved ice and a four-foot high ice sculpture, into which had been imbedded a publicity photo of the Duprees and two of their hit forty-five records. The sculpture soon began to melt, and little fissures and cracks obscured the face of the Duprees but made the sculpture look more interesting as art. Behind it, a hose drained the run-off water into a tub.
My partner, Enrique, referred to himself as “a fish butcher.” He had the broad, handsome face of an Easter Island head. His body was strong and broad. His arm felt like a tree. He was wearing checked pants and a white tunic, and his thick, dark hair rose off his forehead. He was Mexican, he told me, and had grown up in Acapulco. He had been in the States for five years. Usually, he worked at a fish market on 13th Street near the West Side Highway, and when I asked what time he had to be there, he said four AM. His uncle had encouraged him to come to New York. His uncle was a chef at Felix Food, a catering company I worked for. Enrique said his uncle’s name was Guadeloupe.
I said, “Your uncle is Lupe? I love Lupe.” Lupe and Enrique had the same high cheekbones. The owner of Felix Food was a famous French chef and mostly he hired Europeans to work in his kitchen. Lupe stood out there not because he was Latin American. There were lots of other Latin Americans at Felix Foods, as there are everywhere in the New York food world. Lupe stood out because he was patient and kind, while the Europeans tended to strut around and bark orders.
Behind our station was a metal cabinet layered with dry ice and sheet pans of seafood. We wrapped the metal cabinet it in a white cloth, to make it look presentable. We also had a cutting board, knives, shuckers, and towels at our station. Enrique began opening oysters. We had three kinds: malpecques, belons, and blue points. The shells were jagged and encrusted. The insides were clean-smelling. There were also little neck clams, cooked crab claws, and jumbo shrimp. I arranged the food on the ice along with lemon slices and three sauces.
At six, the guests began to arrive. Everyone was tan. The women wore sparkling jewels and showed lots of breast, leg, and midriff. One woman wore a clinging Cher dress that was transparent except for fig-leaf patches over strategic parts of her body.
The raw bar was quickly slammed. Some people wanted to know the names of the different oysters. Some guests looked at the crab claws and shrimp and asked what they were. I have heard such questions many times—in every kind of setting. Food makes people stupid or anxious or needy. Maybe people just want to talk to you. I have seen New Yorkers look at a bagel and say, “What is that?” I say, “Guess.”
Some guests made neat little plates of food, carefully spooning different sauces onto each piece. Other guests piled ten or twelve enormous shrimp onto a plate and drowned them in sauce. A few people picked up oysters, threw back their heads, and placed the shells back on the ice with the uneaten food. This behavior has nothing to do with wealth or lineage. The other day at a famous auction house, a man stood behind me at a buffet table, picked apart sandwiches, and kept placing the uneaten parts on the cloth in front of me. He couldn’t be bothered to leave them on one of the many drop tables located around.
I picked off the used shells and kept our station tidy and restocked. Enrique kept prying open oysters and clams, freeing the meat with Zorro-like swipes of his knife. I flew back and forth to the kitchen, bussing dirty plates. Enrique shucked for two hours, and then suddenly our supply was gone. After that, Enrique went to the kitchen to help the other chefs, and I became a runner for the rest of the food stations.
At the barbecue pit, a chef carved legs of lamb and loins of pork. Ears of corn, yellow peppers, shitake mushrooms, and okra sizzled on the grill beside the meat. There was a quesadilla station, a Peking duck station, a caviar station (with its own ice sculpture), and a pasta station, where a waiter prepared individually sauced orders of farfalle and tortellini. At two long bars, waiters cranked out margaritas and other cocktails on a continual basis.
I enjoyed bounding up the steps to the kitchen, placing my orders, and waiting to receive a new carved duck or a tray of hot quesadillas. Then I raced back through the crowd. I made sure there were enough forks and plates at the stations. I bussed used napkins, glasses, and plates to the sanitation area, as stars appeared in the darkening sky. Often guests are charming, but there isn’t really time to interact with them, so I skirt them as much as possible. I took over at the stations, so waiters could wander off for a bite of food or a smoke. Batons of bug repellent kept the insects away, and at nine thirty the Duprees took the stage a construction crew and sound engineers had spent the day building.
The quartet wore tuxedos. They looked like permanent prom dates or runaway grooms from a wedding cake. They appeared happy to be there and to be singing for the guests, and they let loose into the warm night for more than an hour, saving their biggest hit, “See the Pyramids along the Nile,” for their finale. They said the song had determined the course of their lives, and it made me wonder what fork in the garden of forking paths might have determined my life.
I don’t think I could see such a fork at the time of the party, but now, looking back, I would say it was writing for The Village Voice. I would say it was feeling part of something people worked hard at and cared about, even though—I swear this is true—I never felt entirely secure there in all my 25 years. I thought the thing I had to offer my colleagues was not my writing but the fact I didn’t fight with people (can you believe this?) and I always filed my pieces on time.
When the Duprees finished their set, a DJ played rock music from different eras, and the host, in a courtly gesture, slinked his hips and shuffled his feet amid a group of women who stepped around him with their hands balled into fists. By ten thirty, the partygoers, tipsy and stuffed, became a droopy-eyed mass.
We closed the food stations and laid out coffee cups in a gazebo-like wing of the house that had a roof and was open at the sides. In the center, on a large table, was an enormous, two-tiered cake that said, “Happy Birthday” with the host’s name in chocolate letters. Beside it were four little figures in tuxes, in homage to the Duprees.
I sliced through the thick white icing and made neat squares, as a young man named Meng handed them out. Meng’s dazzling eyes were framed by a thick brush of black hair that crested up in the center over a widow’s peak. He was spectacular looking. He said he’d come to New York from California as a science major, had switched to history, and was now, finally, where he belonged—studying acting and directing at The Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.
At eleven, half the waiters took dinner breaks, while the rest of us remained with the guests. A half hour later, the second group was invited to eat. I had been popping things in my mouth all night, first shrimp with Enrique before the guests arrived, then bits from the platters I’d ferried back and forth to the kitchen. During the party, one of the chefs had left a platter of crab cakes for us in the garage that I happened to pass while they were juicy and hot. By the time of my break, I was no longer interested in food.
At events, waiters are seldom at risk of gaining weight, what with the running and lifting we do and the indifference to food that sets in after spending so much time with it. I spooned a little spicy corn relish onto a plate with slices of crackly pork and a piece of cake, and I took it out to the porch. It was the first time I’d sat since arriving, but I wasn’t tired. At parties like this, free of impatient demands, time becomes a pillow of present moments. The future and past disappear and with them an interior self.
I sat with Natal, who is from Afghanistan and is as tall as an elm tree. He works part time in the dark room at the International Center of Photography and is beginning to earn money as a photographer. He has penetrating eyes and enormous, beautiful hands. I placed my hand against his hand and my entire hand fit onto the surface of his palm, his fingers spoking out. He said he’d started dating a woman I knew named Marietta, a tiny beauty from Colombia, who was spending the summer in Germany as a fashion stylist. “I’m taking care of her cats and chickens,” he said. I tried to picture her with Natal, racing beside his loping gait. I tried to picture them in bed. It was probably like putting a hand to his palm.
By one o’clock, most of the guests were gone, and we could break down the bars and food stations. Some of the crew had already gone back to New York, so there were fewer of us to do the heaviest work. At this stage, the task seemed ridiculous, and because of that and because the air was soft, because our host was warm, because our captain was sweet natured, we stopped being separate people and became a unified entity. In addition to Natal and me, there were four Brazilians, a French guy, a Spaniard, a guy from Gibraltar, a guy from Switzerland, and an actor who’d grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut. There were bars to break down, tubs of ice to cart away and dump, bottles of liquor to wipe dry, box and move inside, dozens of tables to break down and stack and chairs to bag and stack.
The ice sculptures were still heavy, although now they were Dali drip forms. We dumped them behind a thicket of trees where they would disappear by morning, except for traces of the Duprees. During the party, we’d used the host’s glasses, plates, and silverware, so we had to wash, dry, and store hundreds and hundreds of items. After that, we loaded the truck headed back to the shop, carrying four heavy metal proofers and many white plastic chill tubs, filled with mixers and portable ovens, down nine steps and then up a loading ramp. When the washing was done, Natal and I cleaned the counters and the kitchen floor. He mopped. I squirted cleanser from a squeeze bottle. When we were finished, it looked like we’d never been there.
At two thirty, we piled into the last van, and Nando, the Spaniard, hopped in beside me. He said he’d flirted with a woman at the party and that she’d given him her number. She had gotten drunk and kissed him in the darkness past the pool. He was a painter, trying to earn enough money to stake himself in the US. He was morose, pessimistic, and funny, and he didn’t pretend to be faithful to his girlfriend. I asked if he was going to call the woman. He said, “She chose me,” and he shrugged, as if the matter was out of his hands.
The roads back to the city were empty, and we sped along. The Brazilians sang in Portuguese. A waiter named Thad described a man at the party who’d acted like the henpecked husband of his son. The son had taunted him and made demands all night, and the two had remained inseparable.
When we crossed the bridge back to Manhattan, pink light began to streak the sky. I got out on the West Side. It was drizzling a little, and I was still in the present moment as I walked home.
The cast of The Bear.
every bit of this was pure delight: the behind-the-scenes to in-the-scene to after...these catering gigs just feel so alive and pleasurable. reading your descriptions of those mountains of food is like sex. i'm sitting here drooling. it's a chorus, it's theater. i laughed out loud at the bagel, oy. and the funny/sad spectacle of the melting duprees tossed behind the trees; one minute you're a trophy and the next, garbage. i don't need to go to parties anymore, i can just read this piece and be done.
“I have seen New Yorkers look at a bagel and say, ‘What is that?’ I say, ‘Guess.’”
A (pun intended) delicious read!