Glorious Food
(628-2320)
AFFAIRS TO REMEMBER: The annual Met Museum Costume Institute gala since 1973 (except for 1996); the Jackson Pollock opening at moma; opening-night dinners for the New York City Ballet. Occasional parties for Nina Griscom: “They know how you like to do things, and you know how they like to do things, so everything runs much more smoothly,” says Griscom.
WHO RUNS THE SHOW: President and co-owner Sean Driscoll produced TV commercials before launching GF in 1971; Brittany-born chef-partner Jean Claude Nedelec, who runs the kitchen, came onboard in 1976. GF does so many parties (ten to twelve a night in high season) that Driscoll can’t be at every one; his deputies run things with military precision.
TRAY CHIC: You know you’re at a GF party when the waiter scoops the justly celebrated garlic-and-horseradish-spiked mashed potatoes onto your plate, then dabs them with the caramelized onions. People may carp that Glorious doesn’t update dishes often enough, but Driscoll says he’s been taking his cue lately from trendy SoHo bistro Balthazar: “New York is going through a beef bourguignonne-stew-ragout stage.”
AT YOUR SERVICE: Having career captains is a definite asset. “Where Glorious shines is their service,” says top party planner Robert Isabell. “There’s nobody better.” GF waiters have tuxes and long black-and-gray ties in the closet, but they also sometimes throw on dove-gray Nehru jackets so they won’t be confused with the guests. Members of the Blue Man Group were all GF waiters, as was comedian Bronson Pinchot.
THE DISH: In 1995, a sex-discrimination suit charged that GF placed a ceiling on the number of female waiters who could work an event and excluded them from working small parties. The suit ballooned into a class action; last year, the plaintiffs won a total settlement of $425,000. GF is said to be for sale. “We get offers all the time,” says Driscoll, tantalizingly. “But nothing to make things interesting.”
THE TAB: Cocktails from $20 per person; three-course dinners from $95. Minimum food cost, $1,000; parties from 10 up to a grazing buffet for 4,400.
Abigail Kirsch Culinary Productions
(914-631-3242)
AFFAIR TO REMEMBER: When Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central reopened this year, Kirsch catered a dinner for 1,000 to benefit the New York Transit Museum. Waiters dressed as porters served food inspired by the dining-car menu on the Twentieth Century Limited: bourbon-and-molasses-glazed Gulf shrimp, filet mignon Wellington, and baked Alaska.
WHO RUNS THE SHOW: Abigail Kirsch was a housewife with four kids who went on to become the only upscale Westchester caterer in the seventies. Eventually, husband Bob took over the business side, and Kirsch hired others to man the kitchen; her current executive chef is Alison Awerbuch.
Kirsch excels at hand-holding, catering more than 500 weddings a year. Manhattan clients take up much of the firm’s energies these days. The company has started an on-premises catering business at Manhattan’s Pier 60. Other exclusive venues include Tappan Hill in Tarrytown and the New York Botanical Garden.
TRAY CHIC: The steamed lobster with baby-corn pudding and the cherry-glazed chicken breasts with mango chutney have seen a lot of action at weddings. Dessert hors d’oeuvre include mochaccino crème brûlée in demitasse cups.
AT YOUR SERVICE: The 150 regulars are spurred on by incentive programs like “Caught in the Act of Caring”: Waiters who go beyond the call of duty receive a gift at the end of the night.
THE DISH: Kirsch doesn’t usually take on kosher weddings, but one client insisted. Kirsch imported rabbis to supervise her chefs, but the day of the wedding, one rabbi wouldn’t accept kosher wine that was presented. Why? “Some rabbis don’t accept other rabbis’ work,” says a staff member who worked on that reception. Kirsch was forced to swap 50 cases of wine with three other kosher caterers on a highway near the Tappan Zee Bridge.
THE TAB: Cocktails from $25 per person; three-course dinners from $50. Minimum food cost, $1,500; dinners from 25 to 2,500 persons; cocktails to 5,000.
Washington Street Caterers
(925-5119)
AFFAIR TO REMEMBER: For Mickey and Lynn Tarnopol’s fortieth-anniversary party in June, Washington Street re-created a fifties prom in the field house at Chelsea Piers; a wait staff dressed as the cast of Grease served mini-hamburgers on hubcaps.
WHO RUNS THE SHOW: Ronnie Davis, a third-generation caterer, often wears a microphone hidden up his sleeve, Maxwell Smart-style. At a big party, several staff members are wired to Davis, who choreographs things electronically. “I’ll see someone walking in,” says David, “and I can get on the set to the D.J. and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got someone coming from Atlantic Records, let’s switch to an Atlantic artist.’ “
At a Grammy party at the Armory two years ago, at 12:30 a.m., “Madonna decided she wanted a chocolate-covered something,” Davis says. He bolted out to his downtown kitchen and whipped up chocolate-slathered cookies and fruit. “Whatever Madonna requests from me, she can have for the rest of her life,” says Davis.
AT YOUR SERVICE: Davis assigns VIP waiters to follow the VIP guests.
TRAY CHIC: Gold-leaf-brushed caviar beggar’s purses cost the client $5.50 each; Davis maintains others have since copied them. At a sit-down dinner, pan-seared breast of Vermont pheasant might turn up with green applesauce and Brussels sprouts.
THE DISH: For the opening of the New Amsterdam Theater in 1997, Davis wanted to pitch a tent on 41st Street, but the police nixed that. He countered by quickly renting two nearby parking lots, removing a chain-link fence, and pitching his tent there.
THE TAB: Cocktails from $25 per person; three-course dinners from $50 to $90. Minimum food cost, $1,000; dinners from 10 to 2,000 persons; cocktails to 5,500.
Great Performances
(727-2424)
AFFAIRS TO REMEMBER: Mandy Patinkin’s son’s bar mitzvah at Wave Hill in the Bronx; Chappy Morris’s New Year’s Eve ‘98 party.
WHO RUNS THE SHOW: GP started out as a personnel agency for food-industry staff and began catering in 1981. President Liz Neumark, a former photographer and cater-waitress, says the company has exclusives on Wave Hill, the St. Moritz’s banquet spaces, and its own 4,000-square-foot kitchen on Spring Street.
TRAY CHIC: GP focuses on regional American cuisine, like Hudson Valley foie gras ravioli with braised royal chard and fennel in an herbed beet broth. Hors d’oeuvre – miniature veal burgers topped with melted fontina cheese on toasted brioche rounds – are artfully arranged on, say, a black-and-red checkerboard.
AT YOUR SERVICE: GP interviews candidates with hypotheticals: “You’re at a party. Isn’t it annoying when a guest corners you and grabs all the shrimp off your tray? How do you handle that?” Other catering companies use GP, with its workshops on bartending, French service, and carving, to train their own staffs. Famous GP wait-staff alumni: Tom Sizemore, who played Sergeant Horvath in Saving Private Ryan, and Law & Order vet Chris Noth.
THE DISH: At one GP-catered dinner party given by Richard Holbrooke for Hillary Clinton, the First Lady sent her veal back in a fit of p.c. pique.
THE TAB: Cocktails from $18; three-course dinners from $65. Minimum food cost, $1,000; dinner parties from 8 to 2,000 persons; cocktails up to 10,000.
Tentation
(353-0070)
AFFAIR TO REMEMBER: The Fairy Ball, celebrating the opening of the “Victorian Fairy Painting” exhibition at the Frick, featured a spectacular Victorian dessert buffet of profiterole swans, petits fours, and a Wedgwood-blue cake trimmed with Grecian figurines. A whimsical gingerbread castle rose out of a woodland Tentation created in the Frick’s internal courtyard.
WHO RUNS THE SHOW: Emmanuel De Chaunac (president) and Stephan Baroni (managing partner) have an arrangement with celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten; when Vongerichten is asked to organize a private dinner, Tentation handles it.
TRAY CHIC: For a dinner marking the end of the Frick’s fairy exhibit, Vongerichten contrived gilded eggs filled with Valrhona-chocolate mousse and toasted-sesame-caramel ice cream. Each arrived at the table in its own spun-sugar nest. Tentation once served a mainly Continental menu, but American dishes are now in the repertory, as is Vong-style fusion.
THE DISH: The man who in 1974 walked across a tightrope at the World Trade Center worked a wedding catered by Tentation at St. John the Divine, dressed in medieval garb and sprinkling gold dust on the crowd below his high wire as the hors d’oeuvre were going around.
THE TAB: Cocktails from $15 to $24 per person; three-course dinners from $60 to $100. Minimum food cost, $1,000 for dinner; $750 for cocktails. Dinners for 10 to 2,000 persons; cocktails up to 4,000.
Robbins Wolfe Eventeurs
(924-6500)
AFFAIRS TO REMEMBER: Caterer for the Hampton Classic Horse Show’s VIP tent; parties for Marty and Patty Raynes, producer Marty Richards, and Vera Wang. For the last Southampton Hospital benefit, the theme was Galaxy of Stars; RW’s wait staff dressed like Dietrich, Monroe, and Gable.
WHO RUNS THE SHOW: Chris Robbins, a chef at the (now defunct) Hamptons caterer Wilford’s, joined East Hampton restaurant owners Ken and Paula Wolfe to open Robbins Wolfe in 1987. The company is the only caterer with a major New York-and-Hamptons presence, doing an average of eight parties on the South Fork every Saturday night.
TRAY CHIC: RW can go the Zen route, serving caviar on individual demitasse spoons elegantly lined up on silver trays. But the caterer can also lasso the moon if required. Nina Griscom says she likes to call RW if she’s giving a big buffet dinner that’s “really fun and sort of out there.” So does Carl Icahn, whose Casablanca party in East Hampton gave the Motorola crowd plenty to jaw about. Invitations were designed to look like passports, and the cocktail tent was tricked out like a souk, with sacks of beans, brass pots, and piles of carpets. Camel cutouts strutted across the dunes, and a plane was built on the front lawn that “took off” at the end of the party, aided by a light show and the sound of a propeller.
RW likes to do eight- or nine-course sit-down dinner parties these days, spreading dinner out over three and a half hours. “This way, you get smaller tastes of different expensive flavors like foie gras and caviar,” says Robbins.
TRAY CHIC: GP focuses on regional American cuisine, like Hudson Valley foie gras ravioli with braised royal chard and fennel in an herbed beet broth. Hors d’oeuvre – miniature veal burgers topped with melted fontina cheese on toasted brioche rounds – are artfully arranged on, say, a black-and-red checkerboard.
AT YOUR SERVICE: GP interviews candidates with hypotheticals: “You’re at a party. Isn’t it annoying when a guest corners you and grabs all the shrimp off your tray? How do you handle that?” Other catering companies use GP, with its workshops on bartending, French service, and carving, to train their own staffs. Famous GP wait-staff alumni: Tom Sizemore, who played Sergeant Horvath in Saving Private Ryan, and Law & Order vet Chris Noth.
THE DISH: At one GP-catered dinner party given by Richard Holbrooke for Hillary Clinton, the First Lady sent her veal back in a fit of p.c. pique.
THE TAB: Cocktails from $18; three-course dinners from $65. Minimum food cost, $1,000; dinner parties from 8 to 2,000 persons; cocktails up to 10,000.
Tentation
(353-0070)
AFFAIR TO REMEMBER: The Fairy Ball, celebrating the opening of the “Victorian Fairy Painting” exhibition at the Frick, featured a spectacular Victorian dessert buffet of profiterole swans, petits fours, and a Wedgwood-blue cake trimmed with Grecian figurines. A whimsical gingerbread castle rose out of a woodland Tentation created in the Frick’s internal courtyard.
WHO RUNS THE SHOW: Emmanuel De Chaunac (president) and Stephan Baroni (managing partner) have an arrangement with celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten; when Vongerichten is asked to organize a private dinner, Tentation handles it.
TRAY CHIC: For a dinner marking the end of the Frick’s fairy exhibit, Vongerichten contrived gilded eggs filled with Valrhona-chocolate mousse and toasted-sesame-caramel ice cream. Each arrived at the table in its own spun-sugar nest. Tentation once served a mainly Continental menu, but American dishes are now in the repertory, as is Vong-style fusion.
THE DISH: The man who in 1974 walked across a tightrope at the World Trade Center worked a wedding catered by Tentation at St. John the Divine, dressed in medieval garb and sprinkling gold dust on the crowd below his high wire as the hors d’oeuvre were going around.
THE TAB: Cocktails from $15 to $24 per person; three-course dinners from $60 to $100. Minimum food cost, $1,000 for dinner; $750 for cocktails. Dinners for 10 to 2,000 persons; cocktails up to 4,000.
Robbins Wolfe Eventeurs
(924-6500)
AFFAIRS TO REMEMBER: Caterer for the Hampton Classic Horse Show’s VIP tent; parties for Marty and Patty Raynes, producer Marty Richards, and Vera Wang. For the last Southampton Hospital benefit, the theme was Galaxy of Stars; RW’s wait staff dressed like Dietrich, Monroe, and Gable.
WHO RUNS THE SHOW: Chris Robbins, a chef at the (now defunct) Hamptons caterer Wilford’s, joined East Hampton restaurant owners Ken and Paula Wolfe to open Robbins Wolfe in 1987. The company is the only caterer with a major New York-and-Hamptons presence, doing an average of eight parties on the South Fork every Saturday night.
TRAY CHIC: RW can go the Zen route, serving caviar on individual demitasse spoons elegantly lined up on silver trays. But the caterer can also lasso the moon if required. Nina Griscom says she likes to call RW if she’s giving a big buffet dinner that’s “really fun and sort of out there.” So does Carl Icahn, whose Casablanca party in East Hampton gave the Motorola crowd plenty to jaw about. Invitations were designed to look like passports, and the cocktail tent was tricked out like a souk, with sacks of beans, brass pots, and piles of carpets. Camel cutouts strutted across the dunes, and a plane was built on the front lawn that “took off” at the end of the party, aided by a light show and the sound of a propeller.
RW likes to do eight- or nine-course sit-down dinner parties these days, spreading dinner out over three and a half hours. “This way, you get smaller tastes of different expensive flavors like foie gras and caviar,” says Robbins. THE DISH: Louis Vuitton was trying to reposition itself as a downtown brand: For a promo party at the unfinished Mercer Hotel, RW waiters were handcuffed to stainless-steel trays. “They wanted it to be edgy and slightly S&M,” Wolfe says.
THE TAB: Cocktails from $20 per person; three-course dinners from $65. Minimum food cost, $750; dinners for 20 to 2,000 persons; cocktails to 2,500.