Creative Catering

Three chefs discuss the benefits and trends when catering to today’s customers

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By Amanda Baltazar

ACF Chef Jon Papineau threw in the towel at the police department he was working at in 1998 and decided to open his own restaurant. He had no culinary training, just a desire to cook and serve food to people.

By 2006 he was working for the Denver Merchandise Mart, a large catering operation, and since then has worked as a caterer for various operations, from hotels to a convention center and a ski resort. Currently, he serves as director of catering and events for Larkin’s Restaurant Group in Greenville, S.C.

Chef Papineau loves catering. “It’s always something different and I love the personal satisfaction side of it,” he says. He also loves the problem-solving, the “‘how are we going to pull this off?’ aspect.”

Larkin’s hosts about 360 events per year, including everything from casual gatherings to high-end weddings, and mostly offers on-site catering at its two event spaces. But there’s a big increase in off-site events, says Chef Papineau. For on-site events he can cater to around 250 people due to space, but off-site “the sky’s the limit,” he says.

Chef Cassondra Armstrong, CEC , grew up preparing food for a Jewish caterer in a Jewish synagogue, alongside her mom and grandmother.

When Chef Armstrong graduated from culinary school in 1988, she launched a catering company — and a restaurant for a time — before moving exclusively into catering and personal cheffing.

“I love to entertain so catering has always been my fancy,” says Chef Armstrong, who has catered events for up to 600 people. “I love to put on fabulous events, and I appreciate when people eat the food and the plates come back empty.”

Typically, her events take place in homes — intimate dinners for two to eight people — as well as at various venues for weddings, and she also caters corporate events. She loves the larger events, she says, where she has more support staff. “Then I can truly command the floor and be the captain of the whole thing. I can see how it looks front of house.”

Working in hotels when he was younger was when ACF Chef Keith Blauschild, CEC , executive chef of The Cook and the Cork in Coral Springs, Fla., and owner of the 17-year-old Parkland Chef Catering, first developed an appetite for catering because of how it offers the ability to showcase various skills, from the pastry arts to butchery to foodservice management. Starting out in the industry with a catering business worked well, he says, “because there’s so many items you can rent without having to invest in it.” Now his work is split fairly evenly between the catering business and the restaurant.

Catering Trends

Today’s catering customers are requesting more appetizer stations, says Chef Papineau, as well as pasta dishes, and he’s getting more specialty alcohol requests — certain types of beer or wine. Buffet stations outpace plated meals, and Chef Papineau recently had a tasting for an all-Indian wedding, something he’d not seen before.

Special requests tend to be mostly gluten-free, which, he says, “has become so frequent that we don’t even make roux any more — we just use cornstarch.”

For Chef Armstrong, vegan, vegetarian and pescatarian requests are regular, and she has to pay attention to allergens, especially nuts. What’s really popular right now, probably propelled by social media, are island stations, with everything served cold, she says. She’s not a fan of those and says maybe those posting about it are more “caught up with the elaborate presentation and the look of it” over everything being cold.

Chef Blauschild’s clients are looking for high-end plated cuisine similar to “what they’d expect in an a la carte restaurant,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons we’re popular, because the restaurant works hand-inhand with the catering.”

A Sustainable Focus

Before he came to Larkin’s, Chef Papineau created two completely green, sustainable programs with previous employers and plans to get this off the ground with Larkin’s.

At Denver Merchandise Mart, he donated all of his scraps to a composting company, which picked them up. He recycled all oils and only sourced sustainable proteins. He also eliminated cardboard cup holders and switched to plastic trays, saving $12,000 per year.

At Larkin’s, Chef Papineau has an herb garden he’s going to expand next year and two bee hives. He buys sustainable food and is eliminating everything that’s not compostable. “One of the farms I work with is trying to find an outlet for my food scraps, but we’ll probably end up taking them to a hog farm so it would become food for the pigs,” he says.

Chef Blauschild also tries to focus on biodegradable products, so less goes to the landfill. “The volume we’re doing makes a difference, at least to us,” he says. And this usually costs more. “Styrofoam containers are the cheapest way to package something, and bamboo costs more, but we work it into the price.”

He also looks to use better chemicals and cleaning products. “Even just for our own employees. I’ve had people spraying oven cleaner and you can’t breathe in the kitchen so I prefer to buy ones with citrus rather than harsh chemicals.”

Because he has the restaurant he can keep waste low, using up trim “as an appetizer for example. It’s definitely a better way of doing things. And cost-wise it works out if I have something for a catered event and have catered staff prep it and do 30 extra, then I use it in the restaurant, so it cross-utilizes labor.”

Thanks to the variety and flexibility of catering, chefs who discover this segment of the industry typically find they never want to leave it.