How to Become a Caterer: Turning Food Passion into Entrepreneurship

I saw how they were able to put together hors d'oeuvres with all these ingredients and how much money they were able to charge.
Oh.
And I worked the party.
And I thought to myself, a light bulb went off in my head, and I thought, oh, this is interesting.
This is a lucrative business.
Hi, I'm Aravozeri, and welcome to the Entrepreneur Corner of How Much Can I Make.
If you're dreaming of starting your own business and looking for inspiration and ideas, you came to the right place.
We're going to hear all about the ups and downs of building a business from the ground up to an industry success.
So listen on.
So today we have Marcy Barnstein, who has a very successful catering business in New York City.
And we want to pick her brain and find out how you can get in, what the work is like, and how much money can you make.
So first of all, Marcy, thanks for doing it.
You're welcome.
And what I want to know is how did you start?
I've always loved to cook and entertain.
When I was in high school, I lived in Los Angeles and had a very large group of international friends because I had a job.
I wasn't that into school.
I probably shouldn't say that, but I wasn't.
And I worked, I had a job at a very high-end clothing store.
It was the 80s in Los Angeles, and I worked so basically every day after school.
And I worked with a lot of wonderful women and some men, but mostly women from different places in the world.
So I was going out to restaurants and nightclubs and parties with these people who were maybe if I was 17, most of them were either in college in Los Angeles at the time, or maybe out of college, or that age group.
So I I started to learn how to cook at that time because they were living on their own.
And some of them were from Mexico or Italy or Venezuela, and they were living on their own.
And so they were cooking for themselves.
So I was learning how to cook.
I was going to restaurants and seeing what food was about because I didn't grow up in a very sophisticated food household.
But did you cook before or not really.
My father was kind of into the culinary arts a teeny bit.
He was a little bit of a showman and he cooked in the army and so he liked it.
My mom w cooked for the family, but she wasn't a particularly, you know, fancy cook or, you know, established cook or you know, she was a few.
Okay, so you were cooking for those girls from college.
Well, there were guys and girls.
Okay.
Um, and they they sort of took me under their wing and taught me how to cook a little bit, and and then I started cooking for my friends, and and then believe it or not, my mom let me have parties in our home.
So we would have I would have 15, 20, 30 people over, and we would cook and have dance parties.
I mean, it was a crazy time, but that's sort of how I got the taste of it.
Is that when you realized you want to work with food?
I didn't realize it then.
I was in a uh a different business.
So I didn't let me just start by saying I did not go to college.
Okay.
Um, it's always been a a major regret of mine.
It it was a stigma for me, you know, for most of my life.
I finally have gotten over it.
But so I was in a different business.
I I started working in these clothing stores when I was in high school, and that led to uh being an assistant buyer for a clothing store.
Then that led to me working in a showroom, selling to the buyers, and then that brought me to New York City, working in a showroom in New York City, and I did that for several companies.
And while I was doing that, that's when I started to think, I don't think this business is for me.
I don't want to be in the garment industry anymore.
And I started to think, I think I want to be in the food business in some way.
My friends and I love to cook, we love to eat out, we love to entertain, and that's when I started to think about what I can do.
Okay.
And my first idea was not catering.
I wanted to open up a salad restaurant.
Wow.
Because my friend, my roommate, actually at the time and I used to make these incredible salads for our dinner.
We would go to, I don't know if you remember Balducci's on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village.
Famous store.
Yes.
So we would go to Balducci's and we would buy the best cheeses and the best vegetables and lettuces, and it was like the only place at the time you could buy all that stuff.
Now you can buy it everywhere.
We would buy chicken breasts and you know, poach them and make our own dressing, which people didn't really do in the you know back then.
Right.
And we would make these incredible salads, and it would take a really long time to, you know, to do all of this.
And I started to think, what if we can have all that ready and people can come in and pick what they want in the salad and make these great salads for people?
Well, I wasn't the only one that had that idea.
And before I even had a chance to think about doing it or think about how to do it, they started to pop up.
Everywhere.
Every grocery store.
First it started with like the existing um Birken Burke.
Remember Birken Burke?
No, I don't remember that.
First, those kind of places started and put in in those create your own salads, and then some of the other places started to open up that spec specialized in that.
And when I'll never forget this, a place opened up called Tost, which was exactly what I wanted to do.
It was much more upscale and gourmet than the Birkenberks and the And still only salad.
Basically only salad.
Okay.
Great ingredients, great lettuces, great dressings.
And I was so upset.
And I remember calling my friend who was sort of, you know, helping me try to visualize the whole concept and idea, a little bit of an older friend of mine.
And I said, Karen, what should I do?
I'm so sad.
I I felt like, you know, I was so upset and I felt like jumping off the building.
She said, Marcy, call them up and ask them for a job.
Oh, what a smart woman.
Yeah.
She said, Go work for them, learn a little bit about it.
So I started moonlighting for this salad restaurant while I was still working in my in the garment industry in the showroom.
Right.
Which I was sort of on my way out.
And I worked there in the evenings.
And it was interesting because I was the only sort of like adult that worked there, even though I wasn't that old.
I think I was about 27 at the time.
Or I might have been 28.
And everybody was a teenager.
They were all younger.
Right.
And you know, because it wasn't a lot of money, whatever.
Right.
And then I became the assistant manager, I think.
And I, you know, I had a good way with people, and I remember um some of the regular customers said to me, What's your track?
Like, you know, they didn't really understand what I was doing working behind the counter because I wasn't one of the owners.
It was like there's these three guys that owned it, and they didn't really quite understand how I fit in.
And I said, Well, I'm just sort of exploring.
I love the food business and trying to learn about it.
And so I st I worked there for, I don't know, could have been about six, seven, eight months.
Was it a good school?
Did you learn things?
I did learn.
And what what happened was what I learned was a couple important things.
The first important thing was is that I realized that I didn't really have the means to open up something like that because these guys raised a lot of money.
Okay.
And I didn't really know how to raise that kind of money.
I didn't come from a family where I could raise that kind of money.
I didn't, I mean, I knew people with money, but I didn't really know how to put that together.
Right.
I I didn't really wanted to borrow money and so I I kind of realized that.
And I also had an opportunity to cater a couple of parties while I was working there because they were asked to cater parties.
Okay.
And what was interesting was that because they had so many ingredients at the ready, some of the local customers came to them and asked them if they could cater a cocktail party.
So these guys said, sure, why not?
And I saw how they were able to put together hors d'oeuvres with all these ingredients and how much money they were able to charge.
Oh.
And I worked the party.
And I thought to myself, a light bulb went off in my head, and I thought, oh, this is interesting.
This is a lucrative business.
At the same time this was happening, friends of mine who were in Wall Street and finance kind of got wind that I was working in the food business, friends of friends mostly.
Right.
And they started to ask me if I could recommend a caterer.
Oh.
And I said, How about me?
Good for you.
And I, while I was still working at the restaurant.
And still with the garment industry?
I think at that point I might have left the job in the garment industry.
I might have still been there.
I don't remember the exact timeline.
Okay.
But I I remember the first person I catered a party for was the 30th birthday party for a friend of mine's boyfriend.
And I asked the chef of the salad restaurant to help me because I didn't know how to do this.
He was a real jerk.
But he did help me.
And we did it out of my apartment.
And we, I don't know, I bought a couple books because, you know, there was no internet then.
And came up with some hors d'oeuvres and we made them and I brought him to the party and I party for how many people?
Uh maybe it was 30 people.
I don't remember.
Okay.
And we figured it out.
I don't remember exactly what that first party consisted of, but I know that I did it.
And you made money doing it.
Well, I guess.
Right.
I guess so.
I do remember, oh no, I was still in the garment industry because I had a friend in the garment industry who was going through a really hard time.
A guy.
He was going through a crazy life situation.
He was working for a menswear company, and he was moonlighting bartending for caterers on the side.
Oh.
And so he helped me because he worked for me as a bartender as I was getting these first jobs.
And he told me how to do it and what to do and what and he kind of gave me some tips.
And so that was really helpful.
In every catering job, you have to supply the bar as well.
Well, not everyone, not every single one, but generally when it's a full service catering company, yes.
You do the bar, the staff, the rentals, if there are rentals, all the food, obviously, sometimes the decor.
Oh.
Yep.
Sometimes the decor.
We're gonna get to all of that.
It's very interesting.
So So I really started one party at a time.
For how long?
I would say two years.
Wow.
But the parties kept on coming.
Slowly.
But I had the other job still.
Right.
When did you realize, wow, this is my business and I'm gonna build it to the multi-million dollar that it is?
Uh it was sort of on again, off again for a few years because in between all of this, another friend of a friend, another gu Wall Street guy, approached me to help him do a project he he was thinking about doing.
He wanted to open up a healthy fast food restaurant.
And he actually hired me, and I worked for him, and this is in 2000.
I worked for him to help him try to put this together.
He never did ended up doing it.
So it was like on again, off again for a couple of years.
But 2004, there was an article being written in Newark magazine.
If you remember if you remember New York magazine, and they had special magazines that came out, and one of them was a weddings issue.
Okay.
They would have, I think it was four times a year, they had a weddings issue, and they were writing an article and they interviewed three different caterers.
Okay.
And they found me.
I I was doing enough parties by 2004.
Okay.
You already have to.
So I'm fast forwarding to 2004.
You had the roster, right?
You asked me when I you know when I really kind of realized that this was something that was really happening.
Right.
So 2004, they interviewed me for this article, and the article came out.
I was one of three caterers that were interviewed, and that's when it really took off after that.
People started contacting you?
Yeah, it really.
That was like the turning point, I guess, or the tipping point, maybe.
I I I don't know which term it is, but that's when people started to find me.
That's when I was sort of put on the map.
I wonder if you can grow without getting exposure like this, New York magazine.
You know, it's different now.
I I I don't know how it happens now because there was editorial coverage back then was so important.
Right.
And they don't really have editorial coverage anymore.
So I think it's all internet type.
I think about that sometimes because uh that that print editorial was so important.
Before the New York magazine article, I think it might have been in 2002, one of my best friends was getting married.
And I'll never forget she had gotten a proposal from a very high-end, well-known caterer in the city.
And it was too expensive.
And it was I'll never forget this because it was 80 people and it was$13,000, which now that's I know uh other places in America that doesn't sound inexpensive, but in New York that's very inexpensive now.
Right.
And she came to me and she said, Marcy, I got this proposal.
I really love it, but it's too expensive.
I want you to cater my par my wedding.
And I said, Michelle, I'm not catering your wedding.
I don't want to cater your wedding.
I can't cater your wedding.
I want to be a guest, I don't want to cater it.
She said, I know you can do it, I want you to do it, you can do it and be a guest.
I have faith in you.
She talked me into it.
Okay.
I ended up hiring a woman who was the personal chef to a very famous actor to help me because my friend actually also worked for this actor.
And she was terrible.
She screwed up the whole thing.
Me, the person who didn't know how to do anything, was able to do it all right.
But this woman who like had all this experience like didn't know how to do anything.
So I ended up having to like leave in the middle of the party and take over some of the stuff in the kitchen.
But I went back to the party and it was all good.
But my friend Michelle was an editor of a shelter magazine.
Okay.
And she got the wedding published in a magazine.
Oh.
So your name was mentioned.
My name was mentioned.
Again, going back to that editorial coverage, it was very important.
And I think that that and word of mouth and um, you know, catering good parties just, you know, wow, put us on the map.
What is a day of a caterer like?
Catering's production.
So there's so many things that have to happen.
And it's rolling, it's constantly rolling.
So every day you have the people that have a party today, people that have a party tomorrow, people that have an event next week, the week after, next month, next year, maybe in two years.
Is that how they book you for a house?
Depends on what kind of event it is.
If it's a wedding, it might be a year in advance.
If it's a corporate event, it might be six months.
If it's a gala, it might be a year.
Uh, it could be two years.
If it's a bar mitzvah, I mean, it just depends on it could be two days if there's something last minute.
So there's a constant flow of both physical production, planning production.
So there there's always balls in the air.
There's sales, there's uh food production, there's event production, there's design.
You know, I I there's so many aspects to it, which is the exciting part to me.
Okay.
Um, that's the part that I've always loved.
Okay, so let's say somebody hires you and say, Cater, my hundred people party.
How does it work?
You work the men the menu?
How does it you what how do you take it from here?
Well, let me back up for one second.
Okay.
There is a tremendous amount of sales before you even get to that point.
Okay.
That's something that's very important for people to know.
Okay.
There's so much competition in our business, especially in New York City, that you have to be an incredible salesperson.
Forget about having a great reputation, forget about getting a recommendation from your best friend.
You have to sell this job, especially if you're more expensive than the next caterer.
You have to have incredible salespeople and you have to have a great personality.
And you have to be able to explain why a particular person should use your company over another company.
And I think my company has always done a great job of that.
Our menus are highly customizable.
We really care about the client and their needs.
We listen to what they need and what they want.
And I think we figure out what they want even before.
Before they figure it out.
So, okay, we get to the point, we sell the job, they want to work with us.
What happens then?
We listen to them, we talk to them, we figure out the needs of the event.
We know there's a flow.
There's a how do I describe it?
There's a um feng shui or food?
Not a feng shui.
There's a there's there's a every event has a particular kind of need and a flow that has to happen.
And the the food in the menu really sets the tone of an event.
There are things that have to get worked in for every event.
If it's a corporate event, there are speeches and uh presentations and you know meetings.
If it's uh bar mitzvah, there's you know, speeches and there are montages and um candle lightings.
If it's a wedding, there are ceremonies and speeches and um, you know, different things.
Right.
Every event has things that have to get worked in, but all of the rest of the evening is sort of dictated by the food and the catering.
So taking that into consideration, you have to uh then uh address who's gonna be at the event, what type of people are gonna be there.
Every event has different types of needs in terms of the food and the beverage.
You know, especially at a wedding, you know, I talk to people about this all the time.
You have the bride and the groom, and you know, sometimes the bride and the groom are like, well, we only want a vegan menu, you know, or anything.
You know, we we we only like junk food.
Well, you know, your grandma's gonna be there, your aunt's gonna be there, these people are flying all the way from you know Europe are gonna be there.
You know, it's great that you only like that, and I know you want your personality to shine through, and we'll make sure that happens.
Uh you you need to be thoughtful.
And I feel the same way about the staff at an event.
You know, a lot of catering companies, especially New York, and it's changed a little over the years, but they would hire all these models and you know, they look so great, but they're not great waiters.
Right.
You know, they don't really care.
You know, all they care is like if they're gonna get their next audition, you know.
To me, yes, I mean they can't look terrible, but to me it's more important to have a wonderful, friendly, accommodating person who's gonna help your grandmother get into her chair or get someone an extra, you know, glass of wine or you know, help somebody with something that they need than some model or actor that doesn't care about, you know, anybody at the event.
Right.
The salespeople, are you the only one that does the sales?
No, I'm not.
And uh I have 15 years I've had three to four people, including me, selling.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's how you grew.
I do very little actually now.
I have I have three to four people at any given time doing all the sales, and we kind of break it up and and then what happens is you have repeat clients and then they stick with the same salesperson, and then or if it's a recommendation, then they kind of stick with that same salesperson.
And some people sort of specialize more in weddings, some more in corporate, but there's cr a lot of crossover.
So for somebody who wants to get in first, they need to love food.
It's helpful.
What else?
What other uh I mean you have to generally be organized.
Okay.
Hmm.
Let's see, that's a good question.
Do you have to learn to know how to cook or you could just hire a chef?
I mean, you don't really need to know how to cook.
I mean, I wasn't a trained chef.
I um I did do the cooking in the beginning, and I in the very beginning I did it all myself.
I mean I hired people to help, but uh and you asked about the menus before.
So this is an interesting uh aspect of my company that not all companies uh not all companies work this way.
My salespeople actually uh design the menus.
Some companies have a set list.
We don't have a choose one from column A, one from column B.
Right.
Every single menu that we have is customized, which makes it more difficult.
Uh more difficult for myself.
More difficult for my kitchen and my chefs because we're not making the same thing day in and day out.
But I think that that's what makes us different and makes us uh successful because we really are very custom.
So a day in your life, you s we still didn't go through it.
You come to the office, you find out you have four events to cater in the next week.
What do you do?
Okay, well, as I said, I'm not really doing all of that anymore.
But let's say my let's say um let's let's say one of my colleagues or or what I used to do, it's it's a lot of everything, but there'll be you'll be taking clo again, taking client calls for um from things that are happening imminently to things in the future, communicating with the kitchen.
Um so there are certain aspects that are automated, certain aspects that aren't.
When once we have a finalized menu and we try to get menus finalized if we can, let's say three to four weeks before the event, we try to feed that to the kitchen three to four weeks so they can plan their flow.
Um, there's always last-minute changes though, constantly.
By the client.
By the client, yeah.
Once a menu's finalized, we we actually have a face-to-face meeting with the kitchen.
Because even if there are sort of general set quantities that we have for a particular size group, there's always differences, there's always fluctuations and variances because it just depends.
So if you have a group of um 150 firemen, it's gonna be a different quantity than if you have a group of 150 um, you know, models.
My biggest fear is always running out of food.
You never want to run out of food.
And that only has to happen once, and it'll never happen again because it's the worst feeling in the entire world.
So that so we talk to the chefs not only about the quantities, but about nuances in the menu.
You know, we might have something that we do in a particular way, but we have to do it a little different this time for one reason or another.
We also have to staff the events.
So now, luckily, there are uh apps that we use for staffing that make it so much easier.
But we like what kind of app?
There are different apps uh that we use.
One's called NAUSTA, uh, where everyone that are you know, waiters and bartenders and um chefs and all the different They're listed there, and you could just wow, that's the same.
Well, we put we put in the people that we use.
Okay.
We don't just like pick any Tom, Dick, and Harry.
Oh, okay.
And each company puts in who they use, and some of the people we use work for other companies as well, but we only see the people we use and then we request them and they say yes or no for a particular date.
So, but we're staffing and then there's a last minute cancellation, and then we have to replace.
I mean, there's there's just a million things that have to and then we have to do rentals.
You know, every I would say ninety five percent of the events that we do, we have to do a rental order.
Rental of what?
China, flatware, glass.
You do all of that.
All of it.
Did you do that from the beginning, or at the beginning you just brought the food?
Pretty much.
I mean, pretty much.
So on staff full-time, you have a chef and you have on staff full-time, we have two to three salespeople.
Right.
Who are also planners.
So we call them sales planners.
Okay.
Different companies do it in different ways.
Some companies just sell and then they have like a production.
We do we do sales and planning.
Then we have a head chef, and then we have three to four full-time cooks, dishwasher, full-time, uh, we call it a dispatcher.
It's not really a dispatcher in a traditional sense.
They they do all the packing out for every event.
Not the food.
The chefs pack out the food, but the chairs.
No, no, no.
We don't own any of that stuff.
That's all Rendo.
But all the there's a lot of specialty items that we do own that get packed out for every event.
There's also like chefs coats and like little things that have to go with every event, plus all these other specialty items.
So we do a pack out.
There's beverages, there's garnishes, there's uh I mean, it's a million things.
Wow.
I mean, if I had to make a list of what goes with like what every event there, I mean, all these questions you're asking me, I never really thought about it.
There could be 2,000 things.
I don't I don't even know.
It's a lot.
What's the biggest event you did for how many people and the smallest?
Well, the smallest I think might have been two people, but it was very high end.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Um, I think we did a wedding for two people once.
I can't remember, but it was it was it was, I think it might have been like two people for like ten thousand dollars.
I don't remember.
And then the biggest was Polly.
We don't do huge events.
Um I think the biggest might have been like a cocktail party for like a thousand.
That's not huge?
No, not really, not in the world of huge events.
And then I I would say on the average, we do dinners for like 250 on the high, and then cocktail parties.
You know, we can certainly handle cocktail parties for 500, but what happens is in New York City, we only really can work in the places where we're allowed to work.
And a lot of the uh venues that accommodate larger groups have their own in-house catering already.
Oh, okay.
Like the hotels.
So we just generally don't do as many larger events because what's your favorite kind of event to do?
I really like a gala, like a corporate, like a charity gala or a a corporate sort of event, but like a nice one, a high-end, like a beautiful one, because it has the the lovely touches, beautiful food, but it's it doesn't have the drama of a wedding, you know, it doesn't have the such a kind of crazy emotional relationship, you know, it doesn't have the family drama.
I I personally prefer corporate to weddings, but we do a lot of weddings, and you know, the weddings are really how we got our start.
And now you have to have a commercial kitchen, right?
We do.
It's a must for every business, right?
I mean, I I think so.
I mean, but you have a commercial we do.
And what about the people that work for you?
Some of them have to go to culinary school to have some education about food?
Well, I mean, that's not a law.
No, it's yeah, but your preference.
Honestly, no.
If the that that doesn't matter to me.
Uh if they are good great cooks, they're great cooks.
It doesn't matter if they went to culinary school or not.
So let's get to the money.
How much a startup, uh somebody who just starts in the business, how much money can they make?
What's interesting about your question is is that it's also hard to track how much money the profitability in our business because week to week, you know, it's it's hard to track profitability per event.
Because week to depends on how many events you have in a week.
And I always say that I don't care how much volume we do, people always brag, oh, we do$20 million a year,$30 million a year,$50.
I know people that do$50 million a year and make no money.
I know.
I would rather do a million dollars a year and make five hundred.
You know, make a great profit than make do$50 million and have all that stress.
Right.
When you start up, let's say you're not that known, no articles about you yet.
How much money can you make?
Well, I always used to joke that I would never make as much money as I made when I didn't have my own kitchen, I didn't have a full-time staff, I didn't have an office, you know, because I had no overhead.
And it was basically like me and like one person helping me and just freelance staff, and I didn't have anything and it that was all.
Doing it out of your own kitchen.
I mean, so but you can't do that for very long if you really want to have a business.
I don't even know what the average uh profitability is in a business like ours.
It's very different than a restaurant.
It's more profitable than restaurants, right?
It's more profitable, yes.
And the uh the the food uh profitability is higher than in a restaurant.
When you do the bar, you buy the liquor and you bring the liquor with you?
Well, in New York there are a lot of rules about the bar.
And they just recently changed.
So luckily it's made it much easier for us.
And you can make a lot of money on liquor, you can, yes, you can.
But it's not as much as you think.
It's really not.
In a restaurant, that's where they make a lot of money on liquor.
So they may not make as much on the food.
So where in the catering you make more on the food, in a restaurant you make more on the liquor.
Right.
So it's it's it's interesting how it all balances out.
Of course, in a restaurant you have in especially in New York, you have very high rent, and your staffing costs are not as high because you know the way you pay the waiters is very different.
We pay the wa waiters a very high hourly wage in catering.
Where in a restaurant they pay them a low hourly wage, but they make really big tips.
Right.
So it it's all very different how between catering and restaurants.
But I mean, you can make a lot of money.
Do people tip you?
Um, our staff gets tipped.
Our staff gets tipped by I mean, I never get tipped as the owner.
I barely even ever get a gift, to be honest.
But that's okay.
I don't I don't need one.
Um, yeah, so I I mean a lot uh generally, uh especially at a private event, our staff gets tipped.
What's the biggest challenge of your business?
Staffing is very difficult part of the business.
You mean stuffing per party all of a sudden you need 15 waitresses?
And let me tell you why.
What happens is that nobody is ever gonna do it exactly the way you do it.
Right.
So far.
And nobody cares as much as you care.
Right.
And they don't have the relationship with the client that you have.
And even if you're at the event, and and generally speaking, one of our sales planners is at, I would say, 85 to 90 percent of the events, especially important ones like weddings.
Every waiter that's there is a representative of your company.
And if they do one stupid thing or say one stupid thing or do one jerky thing, it's a terrible reflection on your company.
Right.
And it's so hard to control.
Doesn't matter how much training or you know how much they should should know.
People are just like they just sometimes don't think or don't care.
Right.
And it's so upsetting when you have a relationship with a client and you work so hard to make everything perfect, and then some jerk jerk says something stupid or is having a bad day and like is just flippant or rude to a client, and then you you f you find out about it later in the day or and you just can't believe it.
You're just like, why?
Why?
Why is it so difficult to be nice?
I know.
So that to me I think is really probably the hardest part.
Okay, what advice would you give somebody that want to get into the business?
You know, people used always say, Oh, I love cooking and I love food, so I want to get into catering.
Great, but there will be a certain period of time if you do love food and you do love cooking and you are working in the field of cooking and food, that you're not gonna want to do it for yourself.
And if that's important to you and you want to continue to love doing it for yourself, you need to think about that.
Because there it it does become difficult sometimes to have the love of it for yourself when you're in the thick of it doing it for your job and for your clients.
Now, I will say that as the years went on, I got back to loving it for myself.
But there was definitely a several year period, maybe an eight or ten year period, when I really didn't like doing it for myself.
Wow.
So you didn't cook?
Well, I mean, I guess I did, but I I didn't love I didn't have the passion as for it as much.
And my my passion for it has changed over the years.
I'm a much simpler cook than I used to be.
And maybe because I've gotten older and like trends have changed and um my lifestyle has changed, but there were there was certainly a time when uh I didn't enjoy it.
So that's I I do kind of warn people.
I don't try to dissuade people from doing a business because I had a a father who always tried to dissuade me from you know any business idea I had, and I had so many good ideas over the years, and I thought that it was really kind of terrible of him.
But I I do like to warn people about that.
Do you have uh a certain event that was a huge success that you still remember and cherish?
Oh wow, there are so many good events.
Like there's one really good one that was uh a client that's still a client of mine.
It was uh this woman's 40th birthday party, and the par the theme of the party was 40 fabulous women.
So she invited 40 women to her 40th birthday, and she's was an she's an incredible client where um she basically really trusts us, and like she'll give us an idea or a theme and just lets us run with it.
Okay.
So it was like the I think the theme was it's 40 fabulous women, and the color is blue, and like that was all that we were told, and we were like able to do whatever we wanted to do, and it was a seated dinner, and it was just the most beautiful party, and it was at a just gorgeous place settings and a beautiful menu, and we brought in these beautiful Raj tents from India that we put inside the venue, and um it wasn't a big party, but it was just like every detail was perfect and beautiful and lovely, and and the client is perfect and beautiful and lovely, and we've done a lot of parties for this client, but that one in particular was really great.
And do you have one that was a flop or you don't want to talk about it?
No, I would, I would.
I I'm sure we've had many.
Not necessarily not always wouldn't be necessarily even be our fault if it was a flop, but I mean I did run out of food once.
I mean, remember I told you how how you know you only have to remember.
Well, was that miscalculation of how many gonna people gonna be in?
It was a buffet.
I you know, buffets kind of suck because of that.
We don't do a lot of buffets anymore.
Buffets are sort of out of style.
I mean, maybe for lunch they're not.
Stations are more in style than buffets now.
And people don't eat in the same way that they used to eat.
People don't eat as much as they used to eat.
But the going back to the running out of food, because it's interesting, it was a wedding, and um I don't know what happened.
I I I you know, you you never know.
Sometimes people could go back for seconds and thirds, and then and and we didn't really run out.
What happened was like when the last person got up to the buffet, there was like just barely anything left, and you never want that.
You want it to look abundant, even to the very end, which means you waste food, but that just is what it is.
Right.
And I think that the father of the bride was really nasty.
Um, I don't remember it uh I'm any tremendous flops.
I mean, there are crazy things that happened, like the groom that was like so drunk and high that he like took all his clothes off.
I mean, there's like crazy things that has nothing to do with us, you know.
Right.
There are, you know, oh yeah, there was one other one.
It wasn't our and again, we didn't do anything wrong, but it was when the whole like place basically fell down.
What?
Oh yeah.
Angel Oran Sands, remember that place?
No.
That old synagogue on uh lower east side that was all an event venue, and they had the the two sort of balconies on each side, and one of them started to fall.
Oh no.
Yeah, again, it wasn't.
Your employees weren't on the on the tons of people, and the whole place had to get vacated, and so all of our chefs started pulling all the food, and we ended up serving the food like in the park next door.
It was a benefit for um a theater.
What about the waste?
Can you give it, donate it at the end?
There's not a tremendous amount of waste.
Let's just start with that.
Okay.
But not it's it's really strict.
So not really.
The a lot of the larger ch uh charitable organizations require that everything be completely packaged and refrigerated the entire night.
So it's just it's very unrealistic.
Okay.
I mean, there are like little local churches and stuff that we sometimes if there's ever a a large quantity.
So we we give it kind of to the staff and how do you deal with food safety?
For example, not too long ago, all of a sudden there was a recall on lettuce because of E.
coli.
Right.
Well, how do you deal with food safety issues?
You know, the the the eco the that kind of stuff, luckily the those kind of recalls we've never thankfully had an any kind of issue with, thank God.
But in terms of like safety at the event, we you know, we have refrigerators and ice and you know, we're just super careful.
Wow.
Yep.
All right, what is the biggest reward of the job?
I think that anyone's in this business, they have to be people people pleaser, and it's just nice to make people happy.
I I, you know, and to pull off a successful event.
Sometimes, you know, you'll have a guest or whatever come up to you, and you know, like the client will say, Oh, this is Marcy, she's the caterer, and he'll say, Oh, oh, the food.
The food was great.
You're like, the food?
What about the rentals and the bar and the decor?
Like, you know, they think it's only the food, right?
I thought it was only the food.
No, but it's so much more of them.
They're like, oh yeah, the food, like the what do you mean just the food, right?
They don't re people don't realize what goes into it.
No.
And that's what I think is important for your listeners to understand.
That if it if they just it it can't, if you just want it to be about the food, you can be a private chef, or be a chef at a restaurant, or some other food service, or a chef at a caterer, or a sales planner at a caterer.
Right.
But if you want to be an owner of a catering company, it's way more than just the food.
Yeah, I had no idea.
One last question.
Do you use AI in automation in any of your uh process?
No.
Why not?
No AI, not because we are super reticent backward, and we are not early adopters.
I have been talking about AI with my son and my friends, and I I think we maybe could start, you know, writing letters and proposals with it.
Right, but you can automate a lot of things, like if you have on your menu to do this, how many ingredients you need for this and this, and it's all automation.
Well, we haven't started.
Okay, maybe you should.
Maybe.
All right, Marcy.
Thanks a million.
Very educational.
Thanks for having me.
Maybe I should start a catering business be as rich as you, it would be nice.
All right.
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