New York City Le Fooding Event: Getting Ready

Getting Ready

Michele and I flew in a day early on Thursday, September 24^th, to check out the hotel and the event site. The lodgings chosen by Le Fooding for guest chefs was a brand new hotel in Chelsea called Hotel Americano, a Mexican chain of boutique hotels. It had been open only a week, and was heavily staffed and very attentive. Our plan for the next day, Friday, was to find the restaurant Andrea Petrini had found for Blaine to do his prep work, the Del Posto, Mario Batali’s Michelin starred restaurant near the Chelsea Market, and then to find the Honey Space, an empty art gallery called a Pop-Up, where moveable events take place and then disappear. Instead, at breakfast we received an anguished phone call from Blaine: he had missed his plane. The whole team would not arrive until 11 pm, and I was to pick up their luggage (read: food ingredients) and get it to the hotel and ice it down with dry ice. I immediately thought, oh, right, Blaine late, with his head in the clouds, but I could not have been more wrong. They arrived at SeaTac three hours early, only to find that the ice chests were too heavy. They scrambled around town to find some wax boxes to shift some of the ingredients, and by the time they got them ready, a huge line had assembled at the Delta check-in. Cutting to the front of the line, they managed to get the bags checked , but the line at security had also grown, and there was no cutting in line there. They suffered through security, with Blaine and Aaron getting out first, and they ran to the Delta gate, knowing there was not much time. At the gate they were told that they had only two or three minutes until the doors would close, and Blaine assured them that the rest of the team was only four minutes, the time to ride the shuttle train, behind. He left Aaron there to make sure that the gate door would not close, and ran back to meet the train. When it arrived, everyone sprinted to the gate, only to find Aaron nearly in tears: they had 30 seconds earlier closed the gate door. Blaine and Aaron saw that the plane was still there, and forced the doors open. Security alarms went off all over the airport, and in seconds security personnel swarmed the group. See the video.No, they were not getting on. Period. Lucky to not go to jail.

The luggage arrival time was 3 pm, but I went at noon to take no chances, leaving Michele to wander around Chelsea by herself. The taxi driver who took me to JFK was typical of the drivers we had experienced thus far. There seemed to be no rules, especially around police, except you were not allowed to make contact with any other vehicles. Two lanes become three, yellow lights mean speed up, and seat belts? Ha! Forget it! The drive was pleasant to a person who learned to drive in San Francisco, and I sat back and enjoyed the ride.

When the luggage began to slam down the rotary island chosen for Blaine’s flight, I realized that I had no idea what the bags looked like, only the huge white ice chests. I texted Blaine, and he told me that red socks had been tied to two of the bags, and that there was a purple one as well, no markings. I managed to snag the ice chests, the boxes, and the two bags with socks, but wasn’t sure about the purple one. There was one going around and around, and after everyone seemed to have gotten their bags, I took the purple one and added it to the pile. Wrong. After waiting an hour or so for Ben Speigel, one member of the team that was flying in on a different flight, a wild-eyed black woman in a uniform walked by me and gave me the evil eye: “That’s not your bag! Is it?” I said I hoped it was, but didn’t really have a good description. Wrong answer. “No, that’s not your bag!” and she went away and brought a beautiful young woman with a serious attitude who grabbed the bag and said,” What? Do you just go around taking other peoples’ bags?” I mumbled an apologetic no, and then realized as she disappeared with her bag, that I was missing a purple suitcase. I went to the authorities, where Miss Evil-Eye asked me for names. Who’s bag was I missing? I just started naming names, until she heard Jesse Cammerer, and she stopped me and led me to his purple bag outside the office.

I had found a store online that sold dry ice, not that far from the hotel, but it closed at 6:30. No problem, I thought, since it was only 4, and the ride back to the city was usually less than an hour. What I failed to realize was that we had more luggage than any two taxis could haul. “No problem!” our airport ambassador assured us. He would find us a van! 45 minutes later, a non-descript van appeared, and we loaded our considerable luggage into its bowels. The driver was a pleasant South American born American, who just loved to talk. For the first 15 minutes, I engaged him in conversation. When I realized that he would slow the van to a crawl for each answer, generously allowing those behind us to pass us on both sides, I stopped talking to him. Unfortunately, Ben did not get that lesson, and the driver actually stopped and turned around to address him. Green light? Who cares! This is an important conversation! Around that time I called Michele and suggested that she should prepare to find the dry ice store, and make plans to get some, and she volunteered to head out then. Good call. By the time we had circled W 27^th Ave and 10^th st for the 3^rd time, it was 8 pm and there was no way we could have found any dry ice. I hadn’t eaten all day, and my blood sugar was down to somewhere in the soles of my feet. I paid the driver, and rushed to my room to find Michele with a grand smile and a hug. I chugged a champagne split from the wine bar and started to feel normal. Everything was going to be all right. Ben, Michele and I repacked all of the ingredients, using new dry ice, and were thrilled to find the ice cream still frozen solid. Almost nothing had been damaged in transit.

The rest of the team arrived at midnight. The group included Raquel Fenn, Blaine Wetzel, Aaron Abramson, Ben Speigel, Jesse Cammerer, and Austin Johnson, Aaron’s sous-chef friend who lives in the city. Instead of falling asleep, they immediately walked to the prep restaurant, Del Posto, and checked out the kitchen. After that they found the event space, where at 3 am one of the dinners was being served, and they got the full impact of what was about to transpire. They went back to the hotel, and got 2 hours sleep.

When we got to Del Posto, at noon the next day, Blaine and team were seriously into the prep, and almost done. After the chaos of the previous day, they were solidly in control. They knew what to do, and there wasn’t much that could throw them off their game. This was a team that had worked together so long, doing all of the courses about to be served, that it was pretty much rote at this point. Back at the hotel, the next day, the team quietly went over every detail of the service. Who was to do what, when, and what the likely pitfalls might be. Then, with a group high five, they headed to Del Posto to pick up their food. Let the Show Begin!