Don't Try This at Home by Kimberly Witherspoon, Andrew Friedman Read Free Book Online Page A

flights. We spared no expense, purchasing elegant little baskets
     and preparing individual meals of our own bread, a hard-boiled egg, sausage, Evian, orange juice, linen napkins, and so on.
    To ensure the food was maintained at ultimate freshness, we hired a refrigerated truck the night before the flight. We prepped
     food well into the wee hours, then loaded the truck and instructed the driver to sleep in his seat and keep the truck parked
     outside the restaurant. We would return in the morning and head to the airport with him to present the food.
    We went home at two in the morning, got a few hours' sleep, and came back at six thirty . . . only to find that the truck
     had disappeared.
    If this story had happened today, the first thing I would have done was whip out my cell phone and called the driver on his.
     But this was in 1989. Almost nobody had a cell phone—except for Sirio, who owned one roughly the size of a man's shoe.
    Once we recovered from the shock of the missing truck, we decided that perhaps the driver had misunderstood and gone to the
     airport. We piled into a car and made for JFK, with Sirio frantically calling anyone on the planet who might be able to solve
     this problem.
    At the airport, hundreds of Malcolm Forbes's guests, a who's who of New York society, were filing into a private hangar that
     had been converted into a Moroccan lounge, with decorations, live music, even a belly dancer. There was everything you could
     imagine.
    But not a single scrap of food, and no truck in sight.
    At this point, I thought Sirio might actually kill somebody. And I'll be honest: I didn't know what we were going to do.
    Well, everyone is entitled to a little luck and that was the morning when I got mine. At the last possible second, the truck
     came barreling down the runway and we just managed to get the food served to the guests, who had by then taken their seats
     on board the planes. It turned out that the driver had gone home and overslept, with the most famous breakfast on Earth parked
     outside in his driveway.
    One place you don't ever get lucky is in the kitchen. You either make the food right or you don't. Without a doubt, my biggest
     challenge came on a day when we had made the food right, but it was undone by the on-site staff.
    This was in the mid-nineties. I was still operating out of the original Daniel space on East Seventy-sixth Street, and I was
     enlisted to be the culinary chairman of a rain forest benefit, a seated dinner for one thousand people that followed a concert
     by Elton John and Sting. I had complete creative control of the three courses we were to serve, except for one: they insisted
     that the first course be a pea soup featured on my restaurant menu at the time.
    We didn't have the capacity to cook on that scale in my restaurant's kitchen, so we planned to do it at the hotel, enlisting
     the help of the on-site staff.
    Just as it is in a home kitchen, one of the crucial concerns of making pea soup is chilling it as soon as it's been cooked,
     to prevent it from turning brown and to keep the vegetables from fermenting.
    I love logistical challenges like this so I had already sat down with my calculator and notepad and determined how many batches
     we'd have to make to end up with twelve hundred servings, the one thousand for which we were contracted, plus a 20 percent
     contingency. I had also devised a system of keeping the soup chilled that involved storing it in batches in a number of 25-gallon
     stainless-steel containers set in ice water, and periodically stirring it to distribute the chilled portion within the canister
     and help bring down the overall temperature of the batch.
    We made the soup the day before the event, then left the site, entrusting it to the hotel's kitchen staff. They were supposed
     to keep the canisters in the cooler, in regularly replenished ice water, and stir the soup every hour. As near as I can tell,
     when the shift changed in the midafternoon,