NEW YORK – Cooking a meal for a large group is always stressful. Imagine cooking for more than 1,000 guests. Turn these guests into incandescent celebrities like Brad Pitt.
That’s what usually goes to Chef Wolfgang Puck’s catering business, which has to prepare hundreds of plates of salmon with miso glaze or slow-braised short ribs during busy events.
Usually such Shindigs cameras are trained on the celebrities, but with the new HBO Max series “The event,” They held on to the cooks and waiters struggling behind the scenes.
“I think we tend to take catering for granted,” says John Watkin, who co-directed and executive produced the documentary series with frequent contributor Eamon Harrington.
From the Screen Actors Guild Awards to the HBO party for “Westworld”, the four-part series shows the intensive planning and details that go into top-class catering.
Things can go wrong with complex dishes and makeshift kitchens, and that’s one of the lessons home cooks can learn from the series – flexibility. One chef notes: “For me, catering is all about adjustments.”
That was evident last January at the SAG Awards in Los Angeles. Puck’s team had created a dish for 1,280 people that contained roasted chicken with beet and ginger puree and gooseberry salsa verde, as well as misoglazed salmon with sticky rice and sesame pickles.
Then a few days before the event, the chefs received a breathtaking bombshell from the organizers: the award ceremony had decided to go vegan.
Puck’s caterers quickly canceled orders for 250 pounds of salmon and 300 pounds of chicken to prepare a paella rice dish with kale and pumpkin, charred baby carrots with harissa glaze, and bean salad with arugula, olives, and baby peppers.
Cameras recorded the careful building of the bowl on plates that stretch element by element over several meters, often with a tiny leaf tipped with tweezers at the end.
“It moves like an assembly line. But the quality of the product is so high that you can make assembly lines of the most expensive Mercedes you can buy, ”says Harrington.
“It was so hectic,” says Watkin. “So much is happening, so fast, and trying to find ways to capture it all and make sure we have the cameras in the right place and that we are getting the footage we want – it was really a challenge.”
In the second episode, 1,200 business venture capitalists and business bigwigs gather for the Upfront Summit in the Rose Bowl for a two-day event, during which breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner are served. Puck is as much a celebrity as the guests. The chef was often busy – he tried, advised and even manned a cooking station.
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