The catering business, especially in NYC, can be extremely stressful. Demanding clients, traffic nightmares, staff problems, unexpected hurdles, the list goes on and on. As a chef, it is so stressful in fact, that it can cause nightmares for years. There is a current TV series called “The Bear” that is very popular right now in which there is an episode where a young black female chef is haunted by nightmares from her catering days. It’s the kind of show that triggers PTSD in chefs. I can certainly relate to that.
Luckily, I had a kind of guardian angel that would show up often unannounced and magically pull me out of whatever mess I was in.
Gerhard was a strapping young German-American chef who lived above a deli on West 50th Street in Manhattan during the 1980’s. He was energetic, creative and had a wild sense of humor. I hired him once to do an ice carving for a party and we just hit it off and became fast friends.
The man was truly entertaining. He would have this 320 lb block of ice delivered to the street where this party was being held, whip out his ice carving tools (which included a chain saw), and just go for it. Before you knew it, a crowd would gather to watch this creation come to life.
No matter what object or theme was requested, he would go out of his way to create it. As a case in point, The Explorers Club once requested an ice version of Mount Everest for a buffet we were doing for them. You should have seen him carving the details of that mountain out of six 320 lb blocks. It was done so well that guests at the party were pointing to areas where their base camps were!!
And his creativity was not limited to ice. A very close friend asked me to create a special cake for his father’s retirement. The man had spent his entire life as a printer. Gerhard created a replica of the original Gutenberg press out of chocolate marzipan!
He had this talent for just popping up unexpectedly in my life. I remember walking down 6th Avenue one night with a young British woman as my date. A taxi pulls up to us, a man jumps out of the cab with this large duffle bag. He proceeds to pull a chain saw out and starts running towards us. Of course, it was Gerhard and his crazy sense of humor. My date almost fainted.
At one of the first events my catering company ever did at Studio 54, we ran into some problems. We were squeezed into this tiny temporary kitchen space under the main floor. The two helpers I had with me were not keeping up with the demand. We were serving hot and cold hours d’oeuvers for 500 and we were quickly falling behind. Out of the blue, Gerhard shows up unannounced and comes up to me and says “Need some help?” and just turns the entire situation around.
At another event at “The Limelight”, a dance/ night club that was a former church, we were setting up to do a big fundraiser for the Sydney Biddle Barrows, the “Mayflower Madame”, who desperately needed to cover her legal fees for her latest arrest. One of my chefs slipped and fell in the kitchen and sprained his ankle leaving me with a big hole in my staff. As I walked outside to my van, trying to figure out what to do, Gerhard was walking by on that street and says, “Need some help?”
We fell out of contact for a year. He was spending more time caring for his parents upstate. Later I learned he met with a tragic end. As he was exiting off the “Quickway”, he didn’t realize the tractor trailer in front of him had come to a full stop and he went right into it and was decapitated. This, of course shocked both me and my staff, who had truly come to love him. I’ll always treasure his friendship and the unique way we constantly crossed paths and how lucky I was to have him in my life.
Robert 5.2022
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