TEN
Takeout
Joey wasn’t that surprised when I gave him my notice.
“I think I just need a break,” I told him. What else could I say? It wasn’t like I’d found another job. I wasn’t actually sure what I was going to do.
“Well, Doll,” he said. “I’m sorry to see you go, but I know you haven’t been too happy recently.”
“It’s not that I’m not happy . . .” I wanted to explain, but I feared that anything I said would offend him and I definitely didn’t want to offend Joey.
“So, what are you gonna do?” he asked, ignoring my lame response.
“I don’t know,” I told him. It was true, but why did I always feel like such an idiot talking to Joey? It was easier to communicate over order-fires; he told me what to do and I did it. “Maybe try food styling?” As if he would remember a comment he’d made almost a year ago.
“Well,” he went on, ignoring my attempt at a half joke, “I know a guy who has a catering business. He could probably use you a few days a week, here and there. Pays pretty good. Tell him I sent you.”
After a brief phone conversation, Joey’s friend Bob gave me an address on Twenty-fourth Street and told me to meet him on the eleventh floor, wearing chef ’s pants.
The address was the service entrance to an office building. I walked out of the elevator into a gray hallway, where two guys in chef ’s coats and black-and-white-checked pants were hunched over a long table.
Bob looked up. “Dolly?” I couldn’t believe Joey actually told him my name was Dolly.
At the end of the table, there was a waist-high metal cart filled with sheet pans, each one lined with food, some of it bite-sized, some of it still needing to be cut. The table was set up with cutting boards and littered with knives, crumbs, and silver trays. People dressed in black pants and white shirts randomly opened the door to the hallway, letting in the hum of office party chatter, to pick up a tray filled with hors d’oeuvres. Cater waiters.
“So,” Bob explained, handing me a chef’s coat. “We’ve got about twenty different hors d’oeuvres here for this party, some sort of work anniversary or something. Joey said you had pastry experience.”
I nodded.
“That’s excellent. I’m gonna have you cut this napoleon.” He pointed to a large rectangle: three sheets of puff pastry layered with smoked salmon mousse and chive goat cheese. He handed me a long serrated knife. “Just cut them into bite-sized squares, like this.” He pointed to a tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Then you can arrange them on a silver tray.”
I cut the napoleon into small, even squares, then moved on to some of the other, less messy hors d’oeuvres. The top shelf of the metal cart was reserved for hot hors d’oeuvres, which we heated with cans of Sterno lit just below it. Mini crab cakes, mini goat cheesecakes crusted with almonds, marinated shrimp, all had been cooked back at the caterer’s kitchen, and we just warmed them up, adding a garnish before sending them out.
I treated the area just as I would any kitchen station. I organized everything as efficiently and neatly as possible. At the end of the party, we cleaned off the table, threw out any leftover food, and restocked the rolling cart with dirty stuff to bring back to the catering kitchen.
“So,” Bob said as we loaded everything back into his van on the street. “I’d like to use you again. We pay seventeen dollars an hour, and you can work as many or as few days as you’d like.”
Seventeen dollars an hour! I quickly calculated that I could work just fewer than thirty hours a week and make the same money I made at Layla. And from what I could tell, it wasn’t that difficult a job. No flaming grills, no one yelling for ten plates at a time. I began my stint as a freelance catering cook.
On my next day of work, I helped prepare the food for an upcoming event and arrived ready to scoop out hundreds of crab cakes or peel piles of carrots. Kevin, the head chef of the company, showed me around the kitchen, which had most of the same equipment as any restaurant but with lots more preparation and storage space.
“You have pastry experience, right?” he asked. Again with the pastry experience. I didn’t yet realize what a commodity it was.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Excellent,” he told me. “You can start by rolling out these sheets of puff pastry. We need them about double the size they are now, about an eighth of an inch thick.”
“Okay,” I said, looking at the two boxes full of puff pastry sheets. Rolling out puff pastry was tricky, mostly because it had to be partially frozen, or at least quite cold, while rolling. If it got too warm, it would just snap back to its smaller size. And it had to be rolled evenly, otherwise it wouldn’t puff properly when baked. It was a tedious task and, I was sure, a test. If I passed (rolled out the dough adequately and quickly enough, and didn’t complain), I would be given better tasks and be asked to work more often.
For six months I lived the life of a freelance caterer. Just as Bob had promised, I was able to work as much or as little as I wanted. If I wanted to go to a friend’s party one Friday night, I simply told Bob I was unavailable, and, without asking questions or giving me any guilt, he simply found someone else. If I wanted to make a little extra cash, I signed up for as many parties as possible, of which there was rarely a shortage.
We did small private parties in people’s homes, which more often than not left me envious. I could not believe the size and utter grandeur of some of these New York City apartments. This other half always had the most amazing kitchens in their homes, yet they got little use, except for when we arrived, drooling over the multitude of All-Clad pots and pans, the high-end machinery and refrigeration. The irony was always lost on the client.
We did a lot of business events, too: cocktail parties, fund-raisers, corporate promotions, sit-down dinners, sometimes for up to fifteen hundred guests. I learned how to plate food for hundreds of guests at a time and to “cook” food with nothing more than small tubs of the glowing gelatinous goo called Sterno.
Soon, I was able to “run” small parties (usually in private homes), which meant being the head kitchen person, taking full responsibility for all the food, and earning $25 an hour. It also meant dealing with the client/host, and although some of them were sincerely thankful for my efforts, others treated me more like a servant than a trained professional.
My fellow cooks were always rotating and represented a wide range of cooking backgrounds. Some, like me, had come from high-end restaurants and just needed a break or were simply between jobs; others made virtual careers out of freelancing and even did small side jobs on their own. Kevin, the head chef of the catering company, had already been a chef in his own right but left the restaurant world in search of a more sane lifestyle, one with less pressure, fewer hours, and more money. He planned on returning to restaurants one day and resented the oft-heard sentiment that cooks who trade in the restaurant world for jobs in catering, private clubs, or corporate dining are cooks who simply can’t hack it in the restaurant world.
I liked the freedom, the money, even the variety of the foods we prepared—for a while, but where was I going? I didn’t have enough experience to become a head catering chef. My life as a freelance cook didn’t offer much in the way of stability, either. I realized that, as much as it had worn me out, restaurant life offered a steady camaraderie and an environment in which I learned something, really learned something, because I had to do it over and over and over again, every day. Every task I did at Layla and Nobu—every dish, every vinaigrette, cookie, and sauce—I remembered. They had seeped into my skin. And in restaurants, I had worked closely with a chef, almost as an apprentice, and I missed that kind of guidance.
When a fellow catering cook mentioned he had a friend who was looking for pastry people, my interest was piqued. When he told me the restaurant was La Côte Basque, a venerable three-star restaurant practically legendary for the large number of ultimately famous chefs who had passed through its kitchens, I was even more interested. If I was going to return to restaurants, it had to be to a respected one. And I didn’t mind that it was a pastry job; if I had learned anything from working in catering, it was that having pastry experience was a commodity, something that a lot of chefs and cooks either didn’t know that much about or simply didn’t have that much interest in. And, unlike a savory chef, pastry chefs have smaller staffs, smaller menus, and fewer budgetary concerns. With more experience under my belt and a different perspective because of it, pastry chef started to seem like it might be a good fit, definitely a path worth looking into. My six-month catering stint had given me just the break I needed.