How the Empire State Building Feeds 8,000 People a Day

[upbeat music]

There's anywhere from 7,000-8,000 people

in this building daily.

Loading up food

and doing off-premise events is very challenging

in a building that has its own zip code.

The restaurant is always operating.

We have lunch service and dinner service.

But in addition to that, we also have catering orders

for the offices in the building.

I like to compare it to Four Seasons quality room service,

but for offices.

When I get to do the events on the observatory level

or I go to an office that has views of the entire city

that I say, Oh wow, I work at an incredible place.

[upbeat music]

Hey, good morning. Welcome to State. Come on in.

It's 10 o'clock. We got a lot to do today.

We're gonna make sure

that lunch service is getting ready a bit.

In addition to that, we have some catering orders

to take care of today as well.

We have around 20 people on the 67th floor.

We gotta get ready for that drop

as well as a couple of events this evening.

So let's go downstairs and check in with that kitchen.

This board right here is where things can really get crazy.

In addition to the 80 to 90 covers we'll do for lunch

and dinner, we also have three orders to put in today.

Alright, so we're gonna get set up

and get ready to plate up this catering order,

so now it's time to slice the chicken.

The math for catering

has already been done pretty far in advance.

It can change depending on what items have been ordered.

Typically, we account for eight ounces of protein a person.

So in this case, one of these chicken breasts is

around 10 ounces, but with the bone it's 11 ounces.

Catering math is a really tricky game

and it requires knowing exact quantities that people eat

and that can actually change.

You know, like this year everyone's really

into protein, right?

So I've kind of had to increase the amount of protein

that I offer.

How we garnish our food, especially for catering,

is what makes what we do really special

and different than your run

of the mill catering in Midtown Manhattan.

We provide restaurant quality service

for the tenants of this building.

So I like to do like a little crown of thyme

around the chicken here.

And as the hot chicken rests on the thyme

and then we pour the hot chicken jus over the top,

it's gonna really perfume the chicken as well.

It might also make their office

smell a little more wholesome, bring some life into it.

Midtown lunch kind of has a bad reputation in New York City.

And you know, you hear about the corporate slot bowls.

A lot of people that work in Midtown don't look forward

to eating here.

We'd like to change that.

So we brine the chicken for 48 hours. We air dry it.

We have a house made spice rub, that we toast the spices,

we grind them fresh.

We're gonna just do a little bit of chicken jus

over the top.

We know our hot food is ready for our catering order.

Now we need to check in on the sandwiches,

pastries, and salads.

We need to get this order upstairs in about 10 minutes.

So let's see where we're at.

We have numbers.

We know we need six of each sandwich.

I know I need one bowl of each salad.

And then the petit fours are for 15 people,

but we have an assortment of five,

so there's some fun culinary math.

There's about 2.5 per person,

which comes out to approximately 40 pieces of mini pastries.

We're gonna roll this out our back door

and then it's gonna go up behind the scenes elevator.

It's where we might have to wait in line a little bit too.

Sometimes there's construction going on,

sometimes there's a FedEx delivery.

There is a mountain of possibilities that are waiting for us

outside of that door.

That's also part of the timing of logistics is

giving ourselves about 20 minutes wiggle room

for potentially waiting at the elevator.

I'm going to take an express elevator just to try

to get up there a little bit faster in case there's a line.

That's one of my few privileges here.

So we are actually on the concourse level

of the Empire State Building,

the basement of the Empire State Building.

This is gonna give us access to

what we call the passenger elevators.

It's also kind of cool 'cause it's like this

behind the scenes museum that no one really gets to see.

It's one of my favorite kind of secret places here.

[upbeat music]

All right, let's go check on that order.

So we took one elevator to go to another elevator,

but for a reason, that'll get us there

in less than 60 seconds.

It's an express elevator.

We need to get up there to check on that 11:45 order

'cause we gotta be back down at the restaurant

and check on lunch service that starts at 12.

So right now I have a few things on my mind

and moving quickly is really important.

Alright, so we're at the Patina office here.

This is kind of the underbelly.

While the clients are still at their desk in their office,

we have to work very quietly and quickly

and they kind of never see us.

How we set up for every catering is different.

Usually we kind of like to get the lay

of the land of the office

that we're gonna be catering for a little bit before.

So in this case today, we knew we had a credenza

with like beautiful views out here.

So we knew that we would have enough room for our equipment.

Some clients want their orders on china,

which is what we have here today.

We call it china, but china can mean blackboards, marbles,

cake stands, white platters.

We say china as opposed to using like paper/cardboard.

Which some people do want that

for a more casual grab and go type lunch.

But that's not what we're doing here today.

Everything we do in this building is about logistics.

So sometimes we get to an office

and you know, they want you to cater for a hundred

or 200 people

and you realize they're using every electrical outlet

in the space.

So you might have to run an extension cord

out to their office and plug your oven in

or your air fryer in there.

But I'd say at this point, nothing trips us up too much.

In a previous life, I have done really large weddings.

If you've ever been to a big blowout wedding,

you know one of the things

that people really love are stations.

And what makes a good station

is having things elevated and decorated.

So I kind of applied those same sensibilities

that I used to use in that former life to midtown lunches.

Those look incredible.

Even though the order says to be ready by 12,

maybe someone's in a meeting until 12:30, 12:45.

We've gone through all this work

to make sure the food is hot and fresh

and we wanna make sure it stays that way.

So we have these really cool burners.

This will be the front of the buffet

'cause we have our plates, utensils, and water over here.

So we have our beautiful green goddess pasta salad.

We have our strawberry and kale salad.

Roast chicken looks good.

It's hot, it smells delicious.

We have tongs.

And then our sandwiches, everything looks good.

I see we have a little steak falling out.

We're gonna fix that in just a second.

We need to make sure that's perfect.

Looks like we need to move some signs around.

One's right there.

This is a really important part about catering

and some of that detail work that we have

to make sure is done that goes beyond the food

and that's making sure we have signage for all the food.

We went through all this effort

and all this detail to make, you know, these custom desserts

and it would be really unfortunate

for people not to know what they're having.

So sandwiches are good.

Mac and cheese is fresh, hot, melted.

Then we have our sticky toffee pudding,

our raspberry mousse, our peach cheesecakes,

ube profiteroles, and our panna cotta with blueberries.

Looks good.

Now that we know our catering order

on the 67th floor is all set and ready to go,

we're gonna get out here.

It's time to check on lunch service downstairs.

[upbeat music]

It's around 1230, we're a little late for lunch service,

but we're gonna go check in with the service team.

Hey Kumar, how's it going? Alright, good chef.

Alright, so it looks like the first turn is out.

We just have a couple more tickets to put out. We have 11.

We have two branzenos, side of fries.

That's hold fire right now. Are we fired on that?

Everything's fired chef. Everything's fired.

Okay, and then table 23, everything's all together.

No, first course? 23 together.

Okay, great.

Alright, so we'll catch up here.

This is the expo station.

Looks like we have a new ticket.

We are fired on table 31's dessert.

That's a chocolate cake, no ice cream.

Heard. That's a regular right,

isn't it Michael? Yeah.

Sometimes someone comes so often you know exactly

what their ticket is without seeing them.

So it looks like we have a couple

of VIPs in the house today.

And then we have like our expo kit here.

This is where we finish and garnish the dishes.

At lunchtime, we have a whole sandwich section,

which I kind of love making sandwiches.

You have a lot of leniency to kind

of cross cuisines when it comes to sandwiches.

One of my favorite lunch items is the katsu sandwich.

So this is a thinly breaded chicken cutlet

that's been pounded, breaded in Panko breadcrumbs.

Then we have kewpie mayonnaise,

which is this really delicious, eggy, Japanese mayonnaise.

This is fresh milk bread toasted and clarified better.

I like to think of it as kind

of like a Chick-fil-A sandwich, but better.

Why don't you take the soups first to two

and four on 23.

Hands please.

Hands means that we need someone

to run the food while it's hot.

Hot food in the restaurant is number one priority.

Okay, so it looks like lunch service went really well today,

but it looks like we have an oven down for dinner service

and we can't get a mechanic out today.

We're also going into a holiday weekend.

They say they might come tomorrow, but it could be Monday

or Tuesday before we get anyone out.

So now we're gonna have to run dinner service

and possibly the rest of the weekend

without the really good oven.

Honestly, I just, I feel like I let my team down sometimes

if something like that happens.

I really do empathize with them

'cause it's really hot back here.

Plan B is first breaking the news to the line cooks

that they're gonna have to pivot tonight.

And what's gonna have

to happen is the grill cook is gonna have to share an oven

with the plancha cook.

And if you know anything about line cooks,

they don't like sharing space,

but that's how it's gonna have to be tonight.

[upbeat music]

We have two events.

They have a little bit of time overlap.

So one of them is gonna be our seated dinner in the PDR

for 40 people.

That's a three course dinner.

And then at six o'clock to 7:30-8, we have a cocktail event

for 80 people over in the lounge.

That's gonna be a lot of hors d'oeuvres, cheese

and charcuterie and some satays.

In the meantime, we're gonna go grab a little rolling oven

from storage.

All right, great. So this is gonna be our little oven

that we're gonna pack out into.

This is really a workhorse for off-premise catering.

It's a Cambro portable oven.

It's more for holding,

you don't wanna cook in it necessarily,

but it's how we keep food at a safe, hot temperature.

So we need everything

above 140 degrees and this is gonna do that.

So if we load in food in what we call hotel pans

and you can see it has like a oven fan and ventilation here.

And then we plug it in and get it hot

and it'll keep food hot for many hours.

So if you have something you need to keep crispy,

most of these portable type ovens, the steam collects.

So anything that's crispy will no longer be crispy.

So you need to make sure wherever you're going has a way

to make that food crispy.

Yeah, but the kitchen that we're going to, we have an oven

that actually has a fry function on it

and a zero moisture function on it,

which helps revitalize anything

that's already been hard cooked.

Everyone is kind of working on different things right now

for different events.

So Andrew over here, he's working on angel eggs,

also known as deviled eggs.

Vincenzo over here,

he's a blanching baby bok choy for the salmon dish

for the 40 person PDR.

Sous chef, Michelle, is working on getting our sauces

and condiments together

for our 80 person cocktail event over at the Empire Lounge.

So this menu tonight is actually kind of fun

because we made a custom menu.

A little bit of improv,

like 80% of the dish is fun,

but we haven't actually made these twice baked potatoes

in this exact way before,

but we know it's gonna work.

For that specific rolling box,

it only fits this size hotel pan,

so everything has to get loaded into these.

Behind you.

Alright, so these are really fun

because they were baby marble potatoes,

rainbow marble potatoes.

So when we played 'em, we're gonna mix 'em up.

We're gonna do a little purple, little white.

This is a short rib that we actually prepped up

for the seated dinner for an entree

and then we have trim from the ends.

Instead of putting this to family meal

or throwing it away, we came up with a custom hor d'oeuvre

that can utilize this product,

so it's gonna be a zero waste dish here.

Anytime there's like room for like customization,

I take that as like a creative liberty.

And I really love shape and color

and it makes me happy

and I like to think that it makes the guests happy too.

You know, especially let's say

if someone's been in a boring meeting for an hour,

no offense to them,

but I assume most meetings are boring,

so I really want to make the food as fun as possible.

And if it is a custom menu,

I have to think about do we have time to execute,

you know, something that has this many touches on it?

Are there multiple events going on that day?

You know, or is this something we can

do half of the prep for in advance?

So you know, something like a twice baked potato,

you could roast the potatoes, scoop out the flesh

and make the filling and have all that done,

let's say, a day in advance.

Okay, let's pack these out.

So since we're going to an off-premise kitchen,

we're gonna have to make sure to bring all

of our serving utensils with us.

It's almost four o'clock,

which means most everyone is on break

eating before dinner service starts.

But Michelle, my sous chef,

she's over at the lounge getting the ovens

and everything turned on.

A couple of those ovens,

they take a little over an hour to warm up.

Everyone else is on break eating, which is nice.

There used to be a time in kitchens

where we didn't actually take breaks

and we didn't sit down to eat.

We're a little more civilized here

and everyone gets to sit down together

and enjoy a meal together.

I could join them maybe in a little bit,

but I have a little too much going on today, I think,

to sit down with them.

I do at least a couple times a week though.

Sometimes I get up there at like 4:30

after the food's been sitting out for about an hour

and I get like scraps, so that's nice.

So we're just gonna grab a few things

that are gonna help us plate over there.

We're gonna keep it classy.

Alright, so let's do a quick check.

All right, so we got cookies, brownies and blondies,

cheese and charcuterie, skewers and satays.

We have chicken and mushroom in there.

We have a chimi sauce

and we have a tahini sauce for the chicken.

Next we have three hors d'oeuvres, lobster mac bites,

short rib with twice baked potatoes.

And then we need to grab those onion flowers.

I think I forgot those.

Onion flowers, found.

Alright, and then we have our pecoras with peas

and asparagus.

And then we have the mango chutney.

Alright, let's roll.

Behind you, Andy.

[upbeat music]

I got the door, Michelle.

Alright, so this is kind of cool.

We can actually just plug this in right up here.

It looks like the team's already started setting up here.

Front of house has arrived, which is a good sign.

That means we're getting close.

This is the Empire Lounge.

It's what we call the club level,

or the concourse level of the Empire State Building.

So we're getting ready for an 80 person event in this space.

You can see the basketball court has turned into,

it's like they're gonna have a meeting.

And then when they're done with that,

they're gonna have an open bar

and we're gonna set this table up here with all

of our hor d'oeuvres.

Alright, so the Empire Lounge is all set.

This event is ready to go.

We need to get outta here, check in on another event,

but you guys gotta go.