Longoven chef and co-owner Patrick Phelan standing outside New York catering company Sonnier & Castle, where he once served as executive chef. (Photo courtesy Patrick Phelan)
High-end catering is a part of the food service industry often overshadowed by the restaurant experience. Guests at catered events tend to be unaware of the frenzied work going on behind the scenes, and most traditional chefs working in stable brick-and-mortar establishments haven't experienced that style of cooking. Time is always of the essence, and chefs must remain calm under pressure, battle against unexpected surprises and roll with the punches in order to produce hundreds of plates of food a day at events where thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars are on the line.
From multi-million-dollar weddings to corporate parties at Google, equipment taking off down the streets of Manhattan, and fire alarms going off inside the New York Public Library, a new book by food and travel journalists (and siblings) Matt and Ted Lee, "Hotbox: Inside Catering, the Food World's Riskiest Business," explores the highs and lows of this line of work. Richmond's Longoven restaurant — whose chef and co-owner Patrick Phelan, a high-end catering veteran, is featured in the book — will host the Lee Brothers on Sunday, May 19, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. for a cookout and tour stop. We sat down with Phelan to talk about his catering adventures and misadventures as chronicled in the book.
Richmond magazine: How did you first get into catering?
Patrick Phelan: I kind of just fell into it. I found myself unemployed in Brooklyn and had moved to New York to get a job in human rights, which I went to school for. I stumbled into Sonnier & Castle as a chef and had never done catering on that scale by any means. Through the next two years I became the executive chef of that company and stayed there for almost six years. I still draw on those experiences.
RM: When were you approached by The Lee Brothers about the book?
Phelan: I first met Matt and Ted at a James Beard House dinner with Steven Satterfield. It was my first time meeting all of them. [Matt and Ted] were taken aback with how we approached doing the event — it was 110 degrees, insanely hot, and we were in a small kitchen. You learn in catering you can’t spend time talking about what you want to do or how it should go, you just make decisions and hope they are right. They contacted me a week later, and Matt said he was fascinated and would love to talk about it more. I said, "Why talk about it, you want to come work?" They came in the kitchen, and no one knew who they were, and they started doing prep. Ted said he wanted to talk about the heroism in catering and work that goes into pulling these events off. They lived through insane events with me and spent the next four years investigating this on many levels from budgetary [aspects] to party planners.
RM: When did you realize that catering was a different beast?
Phelan: In the first two weeks I was the assistant to a head chef and went to an apartment on East 52nd Street called the River House and did a dinner in an $18 million apartment off of Park Avenue. I was in the building the Rothschilds lived in, and Henry Kissinger — for the first few months in Manhattan it was kind of surreal. I still draw on those experiences with catering. This past Saturday night, [Longoven] got crushed, and I know the way I got through that — with catering it’s been a colossal sh-t show, and nothing in the restaurant world can come close. It allows you to keep perspective and a cool head and make quick decisions and operationalize the business. I’m extremely lucky to have [had] that experience. It was humbling, and Matt and Ted were the perfect guys to tell the story.
RM: How was it different on the cooking end of things?
Phelan: On the cooking side it was completely different. You are staging filet mignon at 3 to be served at 9 p.m. We didn’t have an event space and traveled everywhere — upstate, the Hamptons, Long Island — and it was a logistical operation. I never had that experience with food, and it came down to organization. If you forgot something in Manhattan, you’re not getting back in a half hour. If you could be organized, you could be successful. I had to stage the food for portion control and quality control and make sure the plates for a dinner of 800 people are the same and that you’re not bringing home food after — they were all learning curves. I’ll say, too, when I stepped into that world, you had to earn your way in the kitchen. The hours are insane, and if you’re the cook who thinks you can show up and do things and sweep and clock out, you won’t make it through catering. We would start at 6 a.m. and stay until 2 a.m. sometimes.
RM: How many people did you typically work with at a time for an event?
Phelan: It was all over the place. Sometimes just me and an assistant and five or six chefs, could be 25 for a big wedding or could be 75 to 80 at a big corporate event. Sometimes multiple kitchens on different floors, or you're in a conference room setting up plates. I would jump between multiple channels on a walkie-talkie.
RM: Any catering horror stories?
Phelan: I have too many. [Laughs] My first party I led by myself was a movie premiere at the [Museum of Modern Art]. I literally had guests arrive and food wasn’t ready and set up. I thought I [had] lost my job, and for 45 minutes they waited for food. Another time we packed multiple trucks on a Saturday and had gone all the way to the Hamptons for easily a multi-million-dollar wedding, and when the door to the truck went up I saw that they had sent the wrong truck. We had to make ourselves look like we were setting up to the client and party planner and had to smoke-and-mirror and act like everything was cool. I also set off a sprinkler system in the New York Public Library, and the entire system went off and the firefighters had to physically turn it off — they found it entertaining. Our waiters were sloshing around with wet shoes the rest of the night, and nobody knew.
RM: How was the transition from the catering world to traditional cooking and being in a restaurant?
Phelan: I think it was difficult, and quite honestly, I used to tell people if Longoven had opened our first year back [in Richmond] — and it would’ve happened easily — we would be closed [now]. I think the pop-ups were learning how to come back to food and take your time and respect it. When I left catering, I didn’t particularly like cooking anymore. I had really lost a relationship with food, and it had become a mass-produced commodity. It took a long time to figure out how to cook again. The last year I was catering I wasn’t touching food. I was basically logistics and meetings and clients. When I got back to Richmond I was literally butchering and doing things I hadn’t done in three to four years.
Tickets to the May 19 event at Longoven are $45 ($65 per couple) and include a signed copy of the book courtesy of Fountain Bookstore, a meet-and-greet with the Lee Brothers, food on the patio, and a drink ticket for a beer from The Veil Brewing Co. or a glass of rose.
