Inside the kitchen that feeds Hollywood on Oscars night
For 32 years, Wolfgang Puck and his team of more than 400 employees have catered to the whims and tastes of the film elite
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[LOS ANGELES] After several hours of red carpets, photographs and speeches, there is one feeling that unites most Academy Awards attendees as they leave the ceremony: hunger.
“I see it in everyone’s face,” said MaryJane Partlow, executive vice-president for awards production and special events for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “They are like: ‘Oh my gosh, can you just help me find some food?’”
And if they are one of the 1,600 people invited to the Governors Ball, the academy’s official Oscars after-party, they are in luck.
Inside the soaring, amber-hued Dolby Ballroom – just one short staircase from the ceremony in the Dolby Theater – a luxurious larder awaits nominees, academy members and other Hollywood bigwigs: truffled chicken potpie, its golden pastry emblazoned with the Oscars logo. Butter-soft sashimi sliced from fish that were swimming in the Pacific Ocean the day before. Cannoli filled with silken potatoes and caviar. Spun-to-order gelato served in still-warm waffle cones. And, of course, the signature Oscar-shaped chocolates statues, which receive a gold spray tan on site. All of it overseen by famed chef Wolfgang Puck, who has catered the party since 1994.
But Puck usually isn’t the one tweezing edible gold atop miniature s’mores, trimming slabs of smoked salmon into Oscar statue-shaped slices or microplaning pounds of Parmesan for a ricotta mousse. He has a team of 445 people working the event, and they have spent the last week preparing for their most high-stakes party of the year.
“People only see the shiny part,” said Garry Larduinat, a regional executive pastry chef at Wolfgang Puck Catering, while accentuating the bicep of a chocolate Oscar with his paring knife in the kitchen a few days before the awards. “Not (everything) that goes on behind it.”
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No demand too small
The Oscars party scene is a competitive one, with celebrations hosted by Vanity Fair, Jay-Z and Beyonce, and Elton John, to name a few. The Governors Ball’s edge, Partlow said, is its focus on food. This year’s menu contains 84 different items, including several from Puck’s flagship restaurant, Spago, in Beverly Hills.
And even for Puck’s team, which has catered the Super Bowl and countless celebrity weddings, this is no typical event. The kitchen must accommodate security sweeps, which can take hours and force the team to recalibrate its prep schedule.
If a speech goes on for too long or guests take a while to leave the ceremony, a batch of just-prepared hot food must be discarded and recooked, said Pauline Soukaphay, a chef de cuisine. (Leftover food from the ball is donated to Chefs to End Hunger, a nonprofit that distributes food to those in need.)
And then there are the dietary restrictions. The kitchen staff must be able to accommodate almost any request or craving, said Eric Klein, Puck’s senior vice-president for culinary. Among them: An action star asking for a plain grilled steak cut into small cubes, a director hankering for fresh spaghetti with tomato and basil, or a film legend asking for a slice of cherry pie to go.
“We are running a business that caters to elites,” Klein added. “Wolfgang wants to be able to bring nice things to people.”
During the ceremony, a television broadcasting the event is brought into the kitchen. As soon as the best director award is announced, “We are standing at attention, waiting,” said Chloe Smith, a research and development chef for Puck. “And then it is non-stop.”
A strange perfume
A few days before the ceremony, in the maze-like catering kitchen – located next to the ballroom – a large whiteboard loomed over the kitchen, listing each staff member’s role in colour-coded marker.
The lengthy Governors Ball menu was taped to a window, its pages reaching the floor. On the wall, a large, caricature-style painting of Puck stood watch over the cooks, like a grinning overlord, with the heading: “What would Wolfgang do?”
In November, the catering team met with the academy to begin planning the menu, which rotates except for a few classics like tuna tartare cones and chicken potpie. This year, the organisation asked for more bar food, more chocolate and more Caesar. Then, the team ran their ideas by Puck, though after all these years, they know his preferences well: yes to goat cheese and spice, iffy on peanuts and pork jowl, said Jake Leach, the executive chef.
The preparation of all those dishes makes for a strange perfume back in the kitchen, which on a visit just days before the Academy Awards smelled at once like an ice-cream parlour, sushi counter, spice shop and chocolate factory. Cooks sipped quart containers of milky iced coffee and quizzed each other on famous chefs (“Who is Paul Bocuse?”).
The controlled chaos resembled a scene out of the medical drama The Pitt. Some of the cooks were even doing a bit of surgery: Junghoon Pak, a pastry chef, was filling in a crack on the back of a chocolate statuette. Gaby Arredondo, who has worked for Puck for 20 years, trimmed and pinched the ends of yolk-enriched dough for petite pouches of agnolotti.
Despite running an empire that includes restaurants as far-flung as Singapore and Bahrain, Puck stays in Los Angeles for the week leading up to the awards and the party. At 76, he has the energy of an excitable theatre kid.
As he strolled through the catering kitchen in thick-framed glasses and a black chef’s coat, he snacked on kumquat rounds from one station and checked the ratio of caviar in the smoked salmon lavash at another.
He was thrilled, he said, by the scale and star power of this year’s film nominees, like One Battle After Another and Sinners. “Last year, Anora won, and I brought them into the kitchen,” he said, but he didn’t recognise the movie’s stars.
After three decades, Puck still acts as the party’s master of ceremonies, shaking hands, gilding chocolate Oscars and pouring drinks for Hollywood’s A-list. But the final champagne toast of the night will belong not to the stars, but the staff. It is a kitchen tradition, and one the team does not plan on breaking anytime soon. NYTIMES
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