Feeding 8,000 Daily at the Empire State Building Behind the Scenes

There's anywhere from 7,000 to 8,000 people in this building daily. Loading up food and doing off-premise events is very challenging in a building that has its own zip code. The restaurant is always operating. We have lunch service and dinner service. But in addition to that, we also have catering orders for the offices in the building. I like to compare it to Four Seasons quality room service, but for offices. When I get to do the events on the observatory level [snorts] or I go to an office that has views of the entire city that I say, "Oh, wow. I work in an incredible place."

Hey, good morning. Welcome to State. Come on in. It's 10:00. We got a lot to do today. We're going to make sure that lunch service is getting ready. But in addition to that, we have some catering orders to take care of the day as well. Uh we have around 20 people on the 67th floor. We got to get ready for that drop as well as a couple of events this evening. So, let's go downstairs and check in uh with that kitchen. This board right here is where things can really get crazy. In addition to the 80 to 90 covers we'll do for lunch and dinner, uh we also have three orders to put in today.

All right. So, we're going to get set up and get ready to plate up this catering order. So, now it's time to slice the chicken. The math for catering has already been done pretty far in advance. It can change depending on what items have been ordered. Typically, we account for 8 oz of protein a person. Uh so, in this case, one of these chicken breasts is around 10 oz, but with the bone, um it's 11 oz. Catering math is a really tricky uh game and it requires knowing exact quantities that people eat. And that can actually change, you know, like this year everyone's really into protein, right? So, I've kind of had to increase the amount of protein that I offer. How we garnish our food,

especially for catering, is what makes what we do really special and different than your run-of-the-mill catering in Midtown Manhattan. We provide restaurant quality service for the tenants of this building. So, I like to do like a little crown of thyme around the chicken here. And as the hot chicken uh rests on the thyme, and then we pour the hot chicken juice over the top, it's going to really perfume the chicken as well. It might also make their office smell a little more wholesome, bring some life into it. Midtown lunch kind of has a bad reputation in New York City. And you know, I hear about the corporate slop bowls. A lot of people that work in Midtown don't look forward to eating here. We like to change that. So, we

brine the chicken for 48 hours. We air dry it. We have a house-made spice rub that we toast the spices. We grind them fresh. We're going to just do a little bit of chicken juice over the top. We know our hot food is ready for our catering order. Now we need to check in on the sandwiches, pastries, and salads. We need to get this order upstairs in about 10 minutes. So, let's see where we're at. We have numbers. We know we need six of each sandwich. I know I need uh one bowl of each salad. And then the petit fours are for 15 people, but we have an assortment of five. So, there's some fun culinary math. There's about 2.5 per person, which comes out to approximately 40 pieces of mini pastries.

We're going to roll this out our back door, and then it's going to go up behind the scenes elevator. It's where we might have to wait in line a little bit, too. Sometimes there's construction going on. Sometimes there's a FedEx delivery. There is a mountain of possibilities that are waiting for us outside of that door. that's also part of the timing and logistics is giving ourselves about 20 minutes wiggle room for potentially waiting at the elevator. I'm going to take an express elevator just to try to get up there a little bit faster in case there's a line. That's a one of my few privileges here. So, we're actually on the concourse level of the Empire State Building, the

basement of the Empire State Building. This is going to give us access to what we call the passenger elevators. It's also kind of cool cuz it's like this behind the scenes museum that no one really gets to see. It's one of my favorite kind of secret places here. All right, let's go check on that order. So, we took one elevator to go to another elevator, but for a reason that'll get us there in less than 60 seconds. It's an express elevator. We need to get up there to check on that 11:45 order cuz we got to be back down at the restaurant and check on lunch service that starts at 12:00. So, right now I have a few things on my mind and moving quickly is really important.

All right, so we're at the Patina office here. This is kind of the underbelly. While the clients are still at their desk in their office, we have to work very quietly and quickly and they kind of never see us. How we set up for every catering is different. Usually we kind of like to get the lay of the land of the office that we're going to be catering for a little bit before. So, in this case today we knew we had a credenza with like beautiful views out here. So, we knew that we'd have enough room for our equipment. Some clients want their orders on China, which is what we have here today. We call it China, but China can mean blackboards, marbles, cake stands, white platters,

and we say China as opposed to using like paper cardboard. Which some people do want that for a more casual grab and go type lunch, but that's not what we're doing here today. Everything we do in this building is about logistics. So, sometimes we get to an office and you know, they want you to cater for 100 or 200 people and you realize they're using every electrical outlet in the space. So, you might have to run an extension cord out to their office and plug your oven or your air fryer in there. But, I'd say at this point nothing trips us up too much. In a previous life I have done really large weddings. You ever been to a big blowout wedding?

You know, one of the things that people really love are stations. And what makes a good station is having things elevated and decorated. So, I kind of applied those same sensibilities that I used to use in that former life to Midtown lunches. This looks incredible. Even though the order says to be ready by 12, maybe someone's in a meeting until 12:30, 12:45. We've gone through all this work to make sure the food is hot and fresh and we want to make sure it stays that way. So, we have these really cool burners. This will be the front of the buffet cuz we have our plates, utensils, and water over here. So, we have our beautiful green goddess pasta salad. We have our strawberry and

kale salad. Roast chicken looks good. It's hot. Smells delicious. We have tongs. And then our sandwiches. Everything looks good. I see we have a little steak falling out. We're going to fix that in just a second. We need to make sure that's perfect. Looks like we need to move some signs around. One's there. This is a really important part about catering and some of that detail work that we have to make sure is done uh that goes beyond the food and that's making sure we have signage for all the food. We went through all this effort and all this detail to make, you know, these custom desserts and it would be really unfortunate for people not to know what they're having. So, sandwiches

are good. Mac and cheese is fresh, hot, melted. Uh and then we have our sticky toffee pudding, our raspberry mousse, our peach cheesecakes, uve profiteroles, and our panna cotta with blueberries. Looks good. Now that we know our catering order on the 67th floor is all set and ready to go. We're going to get out of here. It's time to check on lunch service downstairs. It's around 12:30. We're a little late for lunch service, but we're going to go check in with the service team. Hey Kumar, how's it going?

Fine, chef. All right. So, it looks like the first turn is out. We just have a couple more tickets to put out. We have 11. We have two branzinos, side of fries. That's hold fire right now or is it fired on that? I sell everything fired, chef. Everything's fired. Okay. And then table 23, everything's all together, no first course? Uh 23 together, everything. Okay, great. All right, so we'll catch up here. This is the expo station. Looks like we have a new ticket. Uh we're fired on table 31's dessert. That's a chocolate cake, no ice cream. That's a regular, right? Is that Michael? Okay. Sometimes someone comes

so often, you know exactly what their ticket is without seeing them. So, it looks like we have a couple of VIPs in the house today. And then we have like our expo kit here. This is where we finish and garnish the dishes. At lunchtime, we have a whole sandwich section, which I kind of love making sandwiches. You have a lot of leniency to kind of cross cuisines when it comes to sandwiches. One of my favorite lunch items is the katsu sandwich. So, this is a thinly breaded uh chicken cutlet that's been pounded, breaded in panko bread crumbs. Then we have a Kewpie mayonnaise, which is this really delicious eggy Japanese

mayonnaise. This is fresh milk bread toasted in clarified butter. I like to think of it as kind of like a Chick-fil-A sandwich, but better. Uh why don't you take the soups first to two and four on 23? Hands, please. Hands means that we need someone to run the food while it's hot. Hot food in the restaurant is number one priority. Okay, so it looks like lunch service went really well today, but it looks like we have an oven down uh for dinner service and we can't get a mechanic out today. We're also going

into a holiday weekend. They say they might come tomorrow, but it could be Monday or Tuesday before we get anyone out. So, now we're going to have to run dinner service and possibly the rest of the weekend without the really good oven. Honestly, I just I feel like I let my team down sometimes if something like that happens. I really do empathize with them cuz it's really hot back here. Plan B is first breaking the news to the line cooks that they're going to have to pivot tonight and what's going to have to happen is the grill cook is going to have to share an oven with the plancha cook. And if you know anything about line cooks, they don't like sharing space, but that's how it's going to have to be tonight.

We have two events. They have a little bit of time overlap. So, one of them is going to be our seated dinner in the PDR for 40 people. That's a three-course dinner. And then at 6:00 to 7:38, we have a cocktail event for 80 people over in the lounge. That's going to be a lot of hors d'oeuvres, cheese and charcuterie, and some satays. In the meantime, we're going to go grab a little rolling oven from storage. All right, great. So, this is going to be our little oven that we're going to pack out into. This is really a workhorse for off-premise catering. It's a Cambro portable oven. It's more for holding. It's You don't want to cook in it necessarily, but it's how we keep food at a safe hot temperature. So, we need everything above 140° and this is

going to do that. So, if we load in the food in what we call hotel pans and you can see it has like a oven fan and ventilation here. And then we plug it in and get it hot and it'll keep food hot for many hours. So, if you have something you need to keep crispy, most of these portable type ovens, the steam collects. So, anything that's crispy will no longer be crispy. So, you need to make sure wherever you're going has a way to make that food crispy. Yeah, but the kitchen that we're going to, we have an oven that actually has a fry function on it and a zero moisture function on it, which helps revitalize anything that's already been uh part cooked.

Everyone is kind of working on different things right now for different events. So, Andrew over here, he's working on angel eggs, also known as deviled eggs. Vincenzo over here, he's blanching baby bok choy for the salmon dish for the 40-person PDR. Sous chef Michelle is working on getting our sauces and condiments together for a 80-person cocktail event over at the Empire Lounge. So, this menu tonight is actually kind of fun because we made a custom menu. A little bit of improv, like 80% of the dishes is fun, but we haven't actually made these twice baked potatoes in this exact way before, but we know it's going to work.

For that specific rolling box, it only fits this size hotel pan. So, everything has to get loaded into these. Behind you. All right. So, these are really fun cuz they were baby marble potatoes, rainbow marble potatoes. So, when we plate them, we're going to mix them up. We're going to do a little purple, little white. This is a short rib that we actually prepped up for the seated dinner for an entree. And then we have trim from the ends.

Instead of putting this to family meal or throwing it away, we came up with a custom order that can utilize this product. So, it's going to be a zero waste dish here. Anytime there's like room for like customization, I take that as like creative liberty. And I really love shape and color and that's it makes me happy and I like to think that it makes the guest happy, too. You know, especially let's say if someone's been in a boring meeting for an hour, no offense to them, but I assume most meetings are boring. I really want to make the food as fun as possible. It and if it is a custom menu, I have to think about do we have time to execute, you know, something that has this many touches on it? Are there multiple events going on that day, you

know, or is this something we can do half of the prep for in advance? So, you know, something like a twice baked potato, you could roast the potatoes, scoop out the flesh and make the filling and have all that done, let's say, a day in advance. Okay, let's pack these out. So, since we're going to an off-premise kitchen, we're going to have to make sure to bring all of our serving utensils with us. It's almost 4:00, which means most everyone is on break eating before dinner service starts. But, Michelle, my sous chef, she's over at the lounge getting the ovens and everything turned on. A couple of those ovens, they take a little over an hour to warm up. Everyone else is on break eating, um, which is nice. There used to be a time

in kitchens where we didn't actually take breaks and we didn't sit down to eat. We're a little more civilized here and everyone gets to sit down together and enjoy a meal together. I could join them maybe in a little bit, but I have a little too much going on today, I think, to sit down with them. I do at least a couple times a week, though. Sometimes I get up there at like 4:30 after the food's been sitting out for about an hour and I get like scraps. So, that's nice. So, we're just going to grab a few things that are going to help us plate over there. We're going to keep it classy. All right, so let's do a quick check.

All right, so we got cookies, brownies, and blondies, cheese and charcuterie, skewers and sautés. We have chicken and mushroom in there. We have a chimichurri sauce and we have a tahini sauce for the chicken. Next, we have three hors d'oeuvres, lobster mac bites, short rib with twice baked potatoes, and then we need to grab those onion flowers. I think I forgot those. Onion flowers, found. All right, and then we have our pakoras with peas and asparagus, and then we have the mango chutney.

All right, let's roll. Behind you, Andy. All right, so this is kind of cool. We can actually just plug this in right up here. It looks like the team's already started setting up here. Front of house has arrived, which is a good sign. That means we're getting close. This is the Empire Lounge. It's what we call the club level or the concourse level of the Empire State Building. So, we're getting ready for an 80-person event in this space.

You can see the basketball court has turned into It's like they're going to have a meeting. And then when they're done with that, they're going to have an open bar and we're going to set this table up here with all of our orders. All right, so the Empire Lounge is all set. This event is ready to go. We need to get out of here, check in on our other event, but you guys got to go.