When people think of what it would be like to cater a presidential visit, most think of what a special honor that would be (which is quite true) and how challenging it would be with the security, logistics, food and all the pressure the event would bring (which is also true).  However, what people might not know is that a presidential visit is but one event in a day full of events requiring the attention of the gifted and extremely skilled group of culinary professionals at Hope College Dining.

To begin, here is how the week of the President’s visit stacked up.  On Monday, the week started off with a booking for a funeral cater.  The booking, which was for 350 people, came in for the coming Wednesday.  But let’s back up the bus a minute.  Before the weekend, the call came into the catering department that President Obama was coming into town later in the week (Thursday) to visit a factory that builds batteries for electric cars. This factory is owned by our biggest corporate catering client, Johnson Controls, Incorporated (JCI). We were charged with providing the catering services for the President’s visit on behalf of our client, JCI.  Of course, an event like this called for all hands on deck and for making preparations immediately.  For me, as the chef in charge of catering, that meant having a cold and a hot menu ready to go with no idea of the number of people nor if any food would be needed at all. I also had the first of countless meetings with anyone and everyone who might be involved in this undertaking.  One of the first meetings was a brainstorming session with my catering partner-in-crime Tim Blackburn, the catering department manager and Todd Guyer, our production manager.  The first thing on the agenda was to compose labor for the upcoming week. We had to make educated guesses on a lot of it because not a lot of our bookings had firmed up yet.  Sometimes plans don’t gel until a few days before or even later. Catering requires a lot of quick-footedness and flexibility. There’s also an unwritten law of catering: once one huge VIP booking comes in, the floodgates typically open and EVERY possible VIP client wants something on that very same date.  This is exactly what happened.  The initial funeral for Wednesday was the first domino that started the whole cascade of events for the remainder of the week.

So on Wednesday we had a funeral booked whose number of guests attending was likely to rise from the initial 350. The deceased was popular and known by many folks in the area. The food was going to be buffet service at a church across town with cold carved turkey sandwiches and several salad selections; we would provide china and silver amongst other amenities.  Johnson Controls, host of the President’s visit, was also expecting a group of advanced design people from Europe in for a week of meetings, which meant high-end catering with close attention to the quality details and lots of TLC.  And then the real fun began on Tuesday.  In came a booking for 100 box lunches for every morning until the next Saturday.  Next, the number for the funeral doubled to 600 the afternoon before the service, which was to take place at lunchtime the next day. Then, we got a call from an on-campus department.  They wanted a picnic for 150. On the same morning as the President’s visit. “Absolutely!” we said before hanging up the phone and scurrying back to our offices and kitchens to figure out just how we were going to pull this off. And make no mistake – we WERE going to make all of this happen.  It was a matter of grace under pressure, and just how graceful we’d be was going to be determined by how well we planned. We have a love/hate relationship with being busy – we love the business coming in, but then there’s the work part that’s not so fun.  So we had more impromptu meetings, dozens of phone calls, lots of scribbling on notepads and tapping on keyboards.  Through the weekend and into the beginning of the week more bookings came in. By the time Tuesday rolled around, the catering order sheets for Thursday alone were about an inch thick on the clipboard.   Did I mention that wedged in among all of this was a visit from the President of the United States? Oh yeah, there was that too.

The Secret Service and the Presidential Advance Preparation team came in over the weekend and they also used our catering services.  Nice people – simple needs, easy to please.  Tim spent about 6 hours total with them going over the site of the President’s visit and planning out every detail with the team.  Although the President would only be at the facility for a few hours, everything had to be set and ready to go well ahead of time.  We were told that the food, tables, chairs, decorations, staff, everything had to be loaded in before 8 am; after that, no one would be allowed to leave until sometime after the President had left. The President was due to arrive around 1 pm.  In essence, Tim and the staff working the party would be locked in for most of the day.

For my part, the menu became fairly straightforward. There was a list of 300 invited guests which would not change, so it was easy to figure out how much food to plan for.   It was decided early on that hot food wouldn’t be needed, so that took all of those logistical problems off the table.  Per the First Lady’s directive, the lunch buffet needed to be light and healthy yet substantial.  There needed to be 2 or 3 grazing stations for people to come and go with ease.  My own thoughts were that there needed to be as many local, Michigan-based products as possible out on the tables.  The final version of the menu went like this:

Caprese Salad

Fresh Michigan berry selection

Waldorf Turkey Salad wraps

Roasted Corn Salsa with Homemade chips

Gourmet cheeses

Macaroons

Banket

Krakeling

The last two items are culinary representatives of the Dutch heritage here in Holland.  Both are dessert items: Banket is a light pastry filled with almond paste and baked golden brown; Krakeling is a figure-eight shaped cookie made with sugar, butter and flour and prepared in such a way as to result in a light cookie with a cracker-like consistency.  The only hitch came with the wraps: they were supposed to be filled with chicken Waldorf, but there was a supply problem with the select chicken we wanted to use, so we turned to turkey.  Of course, this happened about 12 hours before we had to have the sandwiches done and ready to travel to the venue.  Twelve hours may seem like a lot of time, but it’s really not that much when the product you need hasn’t been found and ordered yet. It all ended well as the turkey we used was very high quality and had the added benefit of being a local product.  Ironically, the turkey came from farms once owned by our funeral client, who was a local pioneer of large-scale poultry farming.

With the food planned out and ordered and the production staff at the ready, the tough part began with the planning for how to get everything else to the venue, including staff.   It was decided we could do the event with 6 people, which pleased the Secret Service – they had encouraged us not to have too many workers buzzing around at the site.  This number was also good because of the other catering events requiring staff for that day.  The chairs, tables and tents were delivered from a rental company the day before so when our presidential catering crew arrived they could immediately start setting things up and making the space look beautiful.  Or as beautiful as a factory can be, that is.

The Big Day comes.  Thursday is barely news as I’m walking to work in the pre-dawn darkness.  It’s just me and the silent streets.  It’s very peaceful in the pre-dawn hours and I tell myself I should do this more often, but I know that’s not gonna happen.  My solitude is interrupted by some random guy on a bike sailing out of nowhere.  He’s towing a Burly bike trailer with who-knows-what inside. It looks like a jumble of junk or garbage.  The guy’s a mobile hoarder.  He brakes a little right before he passes me on the sidewalk and the screech of his brakes makes me jump.  The Zen of my walk is ruined.  I tramp the rest of the way to the kitchen as I hear the Bike Hoarder riding around in the near distance, the now-faint sound of his screeching brakes allowing me to locate him as he aimlessly circles the neighborhood.

I get to work and the place is humming with activity.  It’s 5 am and the President’s food is being assembled and arranged on platters ready for transport across town to the venue. The pantry crew were already going full bore.  I look over the various trays for the presidential event, pitching in here or there before turning my attention to the morning’s other catered events.   The catering crew going out to the factory has to be there by 7 with everything they need, and be locked in by 9. It comes down the grapevine that President Obama is running a little late and now isn’t set to arrive until 2, but this is the way things go for the Leader of the Free World these days – there are so many things on the docket that being on time becomes a struggle. The catering truck is soon loaded and on its way. Everything is on schedule and going smoothly.

When the catering crew arrives at the venue, Tim sends me a text message that everything’s going fine – nothing was forgotten.  He says there is security everywhere.  Soon there is no more communication from the venue.  Secret Service has blocked all cell phone and internet traffic for the duration.  While my small bit for the President is done, I still have plenty to do this morning.  I help Jay, my sous chef, prepare the picnic for 150 hungry maintenance staffers.  Because of the heat and threat of rain they decide to have the picnic inside, which makes things much easier.  I help Jay get things set up, and then I go focus on breakfast and lunch for the Johnson Controls design group.  Today their meeting is Italian-themed, so I make a spinach and tomato frittata with red pepper hollandaise for breakfast and a rustic baked chicken dish called Santori with a side of chanterelle mushroom risotto for lunch.  The food goes out and I spend the rest of the morning and lunch putting together an order and getting some prep lists done for my sous, who’ll spend the next day chopping and slicing product for a wedding coming up on Saturday.

Soon I’m home and basking in the glow of a job done well for the President and all the rest of the clients that day.  We receive lots of compliments on the service, food, etc.  Tim and his presidential service crew are ecstatic and excited.  I give myself a brief pat on the back, a celebratory glass of sweet tea and end up falling asleep while watching episode 37 of Mad Men.  In this business there is very little resting on the laurels.  The next day brings on the next client’s event and another day of challenges to be met, guests to feed and hopefully, more compliments to accept.  The week is capped off with a Saturday wedding reception for 300 people.  It’s a simple affair.  The groom is a former employee who wanted a barbeque.  So it’s a picnic menu set up at Windmill Island, one of our most beautiful catering venues.  The party is pretty laid-back with the guests wandering around the beautiful gardens on the island eating barbeque, drinking micro-brewed beer and admiring the “De Zwann” windmill from which the island received its name.  De Zwann was imported from the Netherlands as a gift to the city and I was part of the team there to cater its re-dedication years ago after it had been painstakingly re-fitted for actual use as a working grist mill.  But that’s another catering story….

-Tom Hoover, Chef Manager, Hope College