Food and the City: New York's Professional Chefs, Restaurateurs, Line Cooks, Street Vendors, and Purveyors Talk About What They Do and Why They Do It by Ina Yalof

Author:Ina Yalof [Yalof, Ina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-30T21:00:00+00:00

The Party Line

In the gospel of Sally Quinn, the veteran Washington hostess and author, there’s only one reason to throw a party. And that’s to enjoy the hell out of it. “If you don’t care about having fun,” she opined, “then have a meeting.”

And if you do care about having fun, I might add, then have a caterer. Please.

These days, someone’s got to worry about accommodating the lactose-, fructose-, gluten-, and/or nut-phobic crowd. And whether describing the first course as “farm-to-table petite mâche and micro-heirloom tomatoes in a fleur-de-sel fairy-dust vinaigrette” when a) both mâche and tomatoes spent forty-eight hours on a truck in Milwaukee between farm and table; and b) the sel came from Morton’s, can be justified with poetic license. And even if it’s true that kale sorbet is the new kale salad, as your second cousin’s food-critic friend insists, does it really have to make an appearance on the dessert buffet?

Aside from such questions of culinary correctness, there are other, larger matters to resolve. The overall menu planning, for one: What’s the right balance between crowd-pleasing and au courant, familiar and exotic? Or, for another, navigating the juncture of social event and social media. When, for instance, is a wedding cake still a wedding cake, but better—better tasting, better looking, and more to the point, better for/on Instagram?

Exactly. Leave that kind of worrying to the experts; it’s all part of their job description. They know how to deal with fussy eaters, escape the scrutiny of the Food Police, and create YouTube–ready food bites for attention-seeking clients. They also know what’s in, what’s out, what’s so out it’s about to cycle in again, and what might never return. Take the triad of caviar, lobster quenelles, and oceans of Cristal, which had its last big moment back in the Reagan era—with no sign of a reprise to date. And that’s because the availability of “real,” i.e., Iranian or Russian, caviar is nil; most hedge-fund baby billionaires are unlikely to know what a quenelle is; and a single bottle of Cristal, about $150 in the 1980s, goes for $750 today. But it’s also about the shifting patterns of collective taste. As with haircuts or architecture or child-rearing, so it goes with party style: Things change.

Once upon a time—say half a century ago—the nonnegotiable prerequisite for a career in high-end catering was to be fluent in French. “Menu French,” that is. If you had any hope of rising to the top—say, banquet manager at the Plaza Hotel—the phrase “ice cream” disappeared from your vocabulary, to be replaced by “crème glacée.” Mastering the art of French menu-speak wasn’t just about getting and keeping the boss’s favor, either; it impressed clients, who in turn wished to impress their guests by demonstrating their sophisticated knowledge of haute cuisine—and, bien sûr, no cuisine was more haute than French.

“No formal menus existed in those years,” remembers Herb Rose, himself a former banquet manager at the Plaza and Pierre hotels, and now, at eighty-two, an éminence grise of the bespoke party-planning circuit.

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