HBO Max follows Wolfgang Puck Catering
NEW YORK
Cooking a meal for a big group is always stressful. So just imagine cooking for over 1,000 guests. Now make those guests white-hot celebrities like Brad Pitt.
That’s what usually faces chef Wolfgang Puck’s catering business, tasked with preparing hundreds of plates of miso-glazed salmon or slow-braised short ribs at buzzy events.
Usually cameras are trained on the celebrities at such shindigs but with the new HBO Max series “The Event,” they have captured the cooks and servers toiling behind the scenes. It starts airing Thursday.
“I do think we tend to take catered food completely for granted,” says John Watkin, who with frequent collaborator Eamon Harrington co-directed the documentary series and served as executive producers.
From the Screen Actors Guild Awards to HBO’s premier party for “Westworld,” the fourpart series shows the intense planning and details that go into high-profile catering.
With complex dishes and makeshift kitchens, something is bound to go wrong and that’s one of the lessons home cooks can learn from the series - flexibility. As one chef notes: “To me, catering is all about adjusting.”
That was evident last January at the SAG awards in Los Angeles. Puck’s team had created a dish for 1,280 that included pan-roasted chicken with turnip ginger puree and gooseberry salsa verde alongside miso-glazed salmon with sticky rice and sesame cucumbers.
Then the chefs got a stunning bombshell from organizers just days before the vent: The award show had decided to go vegan.
Puck’s caterers quickly cancelled incoming orders of 250 pounds of salmon and 300 pounds of chicken, pivoting to making a paella rice dish with kale and squash, charred baby carrots with a harissa glaze and a bean salad with arugula, olives and baby peppers.
Cameras captured the painstaking building of the dish on plates that stretch for yards, element by element, often with a tiny leaf added at the end with tweezers.