Once an unglamorous stepchild among foodservice career choices, catering has become the industry’s fastest-growing sector, in part by attracting converts from among the ranks of midcareer and middle-aged chefs and restaurant owners who’ve grown disheartened with the rigors of conventional foodservice.
New catering practitioners who have fled the restaurant world say they are tired of working 12-to-14-hour shifts six days a week. Some who’ve given up being proprietors of their own eateries see themselves as victims of greedy landlords. Others say they were embittered by invading national chains that stole staff members and flexed marketing muscles that independent operators just don’t possess.
Some of the ex-restaurateurs explain that they feared their young children would grow up without them. And they confess to having been exhausted by the daily pressures of trying to run a perfect restaurant for a finicky public and scornful critics.
Consider these career-switching snapshots from one-time operators who say their quality of life has improved markedly since they transitioned their careers and business focus to wedding receptions, corporate special events, celebrity galas or cooking for wealthy patrons in their homes.
Alan Meister, 43, worked so hard at his restaurant and spent so much time there that he feared missing his young daughters’ entire adolescence before they left home for college. So he converted his thriving, 35-year-old restaurant, Marsillio’s, in Trenton, N.J., into a catering hall to make sure he was home most nights. Self-taught chef-entrepreneur Jeannie Cook, 49, stopped serving dinner at her Culver City, Calif., restaurant, Cook’s Double Dutch, after a 20-year run because she became infuriated with her powerlessness to compete with giant casual-dining chains and multiconcept dinnerhouse groups. Now that she’s a caterer who specializes in banquets and special events, those chains don’t stand a chance against her, she reasons. As a 35-year-old, 20-year foodservice veteran who trained in Europe, chef-entrepreneur Mike Jacobs traded the high-pressure life of a sous chef and restaurant owner in New York for the self-determined catering pace that now allows him to choose his clients and work schedule while enjoying life in Florida. Higher career satisfaction with less work is what 51-year-old chef Allan Fisher says keeps him happy as a caterer, a job he has known ever since acquiring a work permit at 14 to work in the kitchen at the Manhattan’s landmark Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Today, he is the director of dining and catering at Harbor’s Edge, an upscale retirement community in Norfolk, Va., where he and his wife—both of whom are Culinary Institute of America graduates—cook for 300 wealthy retirees, including ex-congressional representatives, mayors, lawyers and business executives.
Professional catering associations and culinary schools say chefs represent only a smidgen of a growing number of midcareer operators who see catering as an easier and more fulfilling vocational option.
Christine Emerson, executive director of the 26-year-old International Caterers Association in Williamstown, N.Y., could not say how many of its 1,000 members had switched from restaurant operations, but stressed that most are drawn to catering by its low cost of entry and less demanding time requirements.
“Unlike commercial foodservice,” she adds, “catering is more interesting, too. You are not cooking the same things everyday. So each job brings its own challenge for creativity and reinvention.”
Maureen Fabin, director of career services at the Institute for Culinary Education in Manhattan, says middle-aged foodservice veterans aren’t the only candidates finding their calling in catering. Many of Fabin’s students are asking more questions about the field and are helping to make the ICE’s entrepreneurial lectures that deal with self-employed caterers among the series’ best-attended events.
Like the fast-food and fine-dining extremes of the commercial restaurant industry, catering is also a diversified mix of business models. There’s on-site catering, where operators like Meister and Cook have turned restaurants or other stand-alone buildings into the equivalent of catering halls. Then there’s off-site catering, which is what Jacobs does now in Miami, serving affluent and corporate clients at everything from a party of two to a banquet for 2,000, all on someone else’s property.
There’s also the institutional kind of catering that Fisher does by working for a community or rich retirees. His side of the business can include chefs who work exclusively for wealthy families, senior corporate executives and law firms.
Huge foodservice outfits like Center Plate, Restaurant Associates, Aramark and the upscale empires of chefs like Wolfgang Puck have thriving catering operations under their corporate umbrellas.
According to the National Restaurant Association, catering is the fastest-growing segment of the foodservice industry, with sales expected to top $14 billion this year.
But it’s not just money that’s making people gravitate to catering.
“I didn’t want to be one of those guys who woke up one morning regretting that the only time he saw his kids was at 1 a.m. in the morning when they were snug in their beds, or the few minutes at breakfast before they caught the school bus,” Meister says
Marsillio’s restaurant in the Chambersburg section of Trenton, N.J., had been a thriving, landmark dining institution for 57 years, and it was also notable in the state capital for being popular among elected officials and political insiders. So influential was Marsillio’s with powerbrokers that nearly every mainstream media outlet in New Jersey gave Meister’s decision to close Marsillio’s major coverage.
Meister says that in the 35 years since his family had bought the place, he’d personally developed a first-name relationship with the state’s previous seven governors.
Now, Meister says, he’ll be happy with three to four parties a week. He gloats that since closing Marsillio’s to à la carte business last summer, he already has dined twice with his wife and another couple at a restaurant other than his own, something he had not done in 20 years of marriage.
Although Cook’s Double Dutch will continue to do a two-hour à lacarte lunch, mainly as a service to executives and workers at the neighboring Sony Studios in Culver City, Cook’s conversion to catering has improved her quality of life by freeing her from nightly obligations and protecting her from chain competition.
And Jacobs, the New York-to-Miami transplant, says he has since cooked for celebrities like Sylvester Stallone and Steven Spielberg, though the freedom to pick and choose clients and when to work is what he most relishes about running his catering company, MediterAsia, named for the southern France of his apprenticeship and the flavors Asia that also infuse his cooking.
A Johnson & Wales University graduate who had put in 12-hour days with prominent New York chef-owner Terrance Brennan before opening his own place in Manhattan, Jacobs was driven to Florida by a brutal blizzard in 1996. He now rents local commissary space and occasionally uses the kitchens of restaurateur friends after hours to prep and cook meals for upcoming events. To staff them he uses various waiter-job ad searches online and word of mouth among servers who’ve previously worked for him.
Fisher, the retirement community chef, thinks part of the career satisfaction he has gotten from catering is because he is closer to his patrons. He likes to tell of a private party he once did that enabled him to share his partridge pie recipe with Princess Grace of Monaco.
“She told me that she hoped [the version her chefs would make] would be as good as the one she had that day,” Fisher says.
