My polar opposite

I had an interesting experience the other night.  I was at a catered event where the food was really quite good.

One of the major reasons I write this blog is to celebrate and share stories about an approach to food that is based on improvisation for home cooks cooking for one or two people.  About half the time I’m cooking I’m the only one eating the results but that’s OK.  I love the time I spend in the kitchen and I want more control over what I eat than I can get at takeout counters, from ready-made meals, or deliveries.

So occasionally my true love and I will eat at restaurants and I love restaurants, too.  I realize that the skillsets of the people in the kitchen usually exceed mine and their resources are probably superior to mine and I like the whole idea of being served every once in a while.  Plus, in a restaurant, I not only get to choose the restaurant (with the cooperation of my true love of course) but I also choose from their menu. 

I don’t know what to call the opposite  of my style, exactly.  The results are multiple portions of the same meal served to a large group of people, with buffets being a subset of the genre.  I honestly don’t have a lot of experience in this area and what experience I do have has not been very good.  For the last several years, I think I’ve encountered this approach mostly on airplanes and I don’t think I need to say anything more about airplane food.

I don’t go to many banquets or parties, but I’ve had my share of bland chicken, overcooked salmon, and greyish-green limp broccoli.  I’ve also been at the wrong end of service and my overcooked salmon was cold, or at events where the head table was getting dessert before the back of the room got bread and butter, and I’m sure all of you have some of the same experiences.  It never bothered me, though, because I just assumed that’s how it always was.  Until last Tuesday night.

I was at work event that was celebrating our partners and I had resigned myself to the kind of food I’ve always gotten at events like this.  I should say that I started a new job about six months ago and this was the first event I’ve attended here. The night was something of a revelation because it was really, really good.  It was everything that every catered event I’d been to before this was not and as I recognized mid-meal, it was exactly the opposite of my approach to food.

A real review would be silly but just let me say that the appetizer was a salad of some complexity and the plates at my table all looked identical. The main course was a medium-rare steak with garlic mashed potatoes and broccolini and as far as I could tell, every steak was cooked to same medium-rare state and every single plate had the steak angled against the broccolini in the same way.  Amazing.

Service was provided by a group of black uniformed servers who snaked out of the kitchen in single file to surround a table, drop the plates, and return to the kitchen and provide a bit of a show.  While doing so, however, they had their timing coordinated so that two or three servers were available to clear the table at just the right time and a few moments later the snake line returned with the next course.

I was impressed and now I know that it is possible to provide an excellent dining experience for 100+ people in the same room.  I don’t see me trying it though.