Hotbox: Inside Catering, the Food World's Riskiest Business

by Matt Lee, Ted Lee

Overview

Now in paperback: the beloved Lee Brothers take on the wild, competitive world of high-end catering, exposing secrets of the food business that no home cook or restaurant chef has experienced.

Hotbox exposes the real-life drama that takes place behind cavernous event spaces and soaring white tents, where cooking conditions have more in common with a mobile army hospital than a restaurant and clients tend to be highly emotional and demanding. It's a realm where eccentric characters, working in extreme conditions, must produce magical events, instantly adapting when, for instance, the host's toast runs a half hour too long, a hailstorm erupts, or a rolling rack of hundreds of dessert parfaits goes wheels-up.

The Lee brothers, known for their humane portrayals of uncelebrated food workers for the catering business for four years, learning the culture from the inside out. Now, Matt and Ted take you along for the ride as they dash through black-tie fund-raisers, spot celebrities at a Hamptons cookout, or follow a silverware crew at 3:00 a.m. in a warehouse in New Jersey. Along the way, you'll get to know every facet of this essential industry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250241399
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/25/2020
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Matt and Ted Lee are the authors of several bestselling cookbooks: Charleston Kitchen, Southern Cookbook, and Simple Fresh Southern. They have written for the New York Times, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, The New York Times Magazine, Gourmet, Saveur, and other publications, and have appeared on many TV shows, including Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and The Today Show. They have won six James Beard and IACP Awards.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Manchego Mayhem 15

2 Not the Sharpest Knife in the Drawer 31

Sidebar: Prep Facts

3 The Client Is (Almost) Always Right 55

4 Fiesta in the Palace 73

5 The Telephone Chef, the Glorious Guys, and G.I. Joe Veterans Frankfurter Service 89

6 Dinner in Light and Dark 115

Sidebar: Sheet Pan Magic

7 The Big Pink Hippo 143

Sidebar: Glass Facts

8 Sixteen Hundred Deviled Eggs 161

Sidebar: Working the Hotbox

9 Can I Even Eat This? 183

10 No Milk! (Butter and Cream Okay) 195

11 Great Expectations 207

Recipe: Bathtub Pasta Salad

12 The Happy Couple Fancied Themselves Food Curators 235

Sidebar: Nuptials by the Numbers

13 Piercing the Veil 255

Acknowledgments 271

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR HOTBOX
"Hotbox is the Kitchen Confidential of the big-ticket catering world."
—The New York Times

"Lively...[with] just the right combination of sophistication and self-deprecation [to] show us what really goes on behind the scenes."
—The Wall Street Journal

"Fast and furious and funny, Hotbox digs deep into the messy, mad world of catering. It's an absorbing, immersive, appetizing tale, written with sharp intelligence and style."
—Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book

“Hotbox takes you from the frying pan into the fire. The cutthroat world of catered events come to life in this compelling book by the Lee Brothers.”
—Tom Colicchio

“Catering chefs and their teams are often the unsung heroes of the culinary world. With compelling storytelling, Matt and Ted Lee take you behind-the-scenes to show the challenges, perseverance, integrity, and work ethic necessary to achieve excellence.”
—Drew Nieporent, Restaurateur: Nobu, Bâtard, Tribeca Grill

"Who knew that food improv was a thing? Hotbox is wicked and funny as hell. The Lee Bros. journeyed into the lowly outback of haute cuisine—catering—and came out with a new genre, food bouffe."
—Jack Hitt, author of Bunch of Amateurs

“A brilliant, gleeful, fly-on-the-lip-of-a-saucepan narrative, full of tips and secrets, and proof (yet again) that some of our greatest stories are in how we make food. You will never ever take a passed hors d’oeuvre for granted.”
—Bill Buford, bestselling author of Heat

"The Lee brothers...pull back the curtain on the catering world, an often-dismissed arm of the culinary industry denounced for its 'rubber chicken and dry salmon,' in this captivating tell-all.”
—Publishers Weekly

"Readers see behind the scenes of galas to show the conflict between sales teams and kitchen teams, understand the unique challenges of creating restaurant-quality food for a single evening, and meet the major players in the New York event world. The authors' reverence for caterers' work ethic comes through on every page. A mixture of history and memoir, the Lees' investigation offers insights into a segment of the food world that often deliberately keeps itself invisible."
—Booklist

From the Publisher

Ultimately, the greatest accomplishment of Hotbox is that it's careful to separate catering from restaurant work, making clear how different they are. In doing so, the authors both explain and ennoble a profession whose mechanics, like those who execute them, "need to be hidden…so the pageant appears effortless."

The New York Times Book Review - Charlotte Druckman

11/12/2018
The Lee brothers (The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook) pulls back the curtain on the catering world, an often-dismissed arm of the culinary industry denounced for its “rubber chicken and dry salmon,” in this captivating tell-all Caterers are unlikely to find stardom, the authors write, though their food is “often as succulent... as what’s served at the gastronomic temples of the nation.” To learn what fuels the stressful, no-glory business, the Lee brothers don aprons for a New York City catering giant, working their way from the prep kitchen to the “fiestas,” or live events—including intimate donor dinners at art galleries and extravagant upstate weddings. They uncover a scrappy, innovative ecosystem, best demonstrated by caterers’ near-universal reliance on the “hotbox,” an “upright aluminum cabinet on wheels” used to transport food and powered by Sterno lamps. The authors track how meal delivery services of the 1960s escalated into today’s parties for the über-rich, replete with gimmicks like “meringues floating through the room suspended by white balloons.” The Lee brothers’ evocative behind-the-scenes look showcases the workforce of innovators (many of them immigrants) thriving on “culinary triage.” This is an intriguing look at an industry often hidden from the thousands of guests it serves nightly. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Award-winning cookbook authors and brothers Matt and Ted Lee go behind the scenes to examine the most competitive cooking of all—New York City’s high-end catering. As the Lees deftly interview chefs, workers, and clients, their Southern charm enhances their narration. Listeners will feel part of the team as they spend four years working at all levels of preparing “fiestas” for the New York Public Library, museums, and other institutions. Facts about the history of catering and the venues of the events add to the listening pleasure. Most moving is the Lees’ distress that few of the clients appreciate or even thank the people (servers, etc.) who make each event succeed. Even non-foodies will savor lesser known morsels of information and marvel at how the wealthy celebrate. S.G.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

MAY 2019 - AudioFile

Award-winning cookbook authors and brothers Matt and Ted Lee go behind the scenes to examine the most competitive cooking of all—New York City’s high-end catering. As the Lees deftly interview chefs, workers, and clients, their Southern charm enhances their narration. Listeners will feel part of the team as they spend four years working at all levels of preparing “fiestas” for the New York Public Library, museums, and other institutions. Facts about the history of catering and the venues of the events add to the listening pleasure. Most moving is the Lees’ distress that few of the clients appreciate or even thank the people (servers, etc.) who make each event succeed. Even non-foodies will savor lesser known morsels of information and marvel at how the wealthy celebrate. S.G.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

MAY 2019 - AudioFile

2018-12-30

Two cookbook authors who once thought of catering as "the elevator music of the culinary arts" reveal the secrets of the craft.

If one prepares thousands of meals at once, "how could the quality of the food not suffer?" So went the thinking of the Lee brothers (The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen, 2013, etc.), Charleston, South Carolina, natives famous for cookbooks celebrating Southern cuisine, who spent four years interviewing industry professionals and working as kitchen assistants for a large New York catering firm. The key to serving all those dishes is the hotbox, also known as a proofer, "an upright aluminum cabinet on wheels, lifeblood for caterers," which "conveys partially cooked food from the refrigerator at the caterer's prep kitchen to the site of the party" with the help of Sterno food warmers. The book chronicles the authors' experiences as they graduated from prep chefs to working the actual events, known in the trade as fiestas. Descriptions of party preparations get repetitive after a while, but the authors do a solid job documenting the history of the industry and detailing the pressures caterers contend with, from client requests—producer Norman Lear once demanded to have a carpet installed in a room where a fundraiser was to be held because he didn't like the acoustics—to the precision required to put just the right amount of celery-root slaw atop beef brioche appetizers. The authors also share plenty of entertaining anecdotes—e.g., about the caterer who "had to mix pasta salad in the bathtub of a walk-up apartment" to make sure he had enough for 6,000 Gracie Mansion guests during the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York.

"A fifteen-minute delay in serving fish is the difference between fantastic and lackluster," write the authors. This book will give readers a newfound appreciation of caterers' artistry and their constant perch on the precipice of failure.

Kirkus Reviews