Catering & Me

Good evening. Cooking and serving hundreds of burgers with brother Jon over the weekend took it's toll. I'm still recovering, so I thought I would take the easy way out today and share an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer that was written about one of my favorite catering experiences. I started working with Max & Jon full time on St. Patty's Day 2000. One of my first projects was meeting and working with our clients for the Republican National Convention. What started out as one major client turned into three major clients and a volume of business that in two weeks was equivalent to 45% of the sales volume Max & Me Catering had done in all of 1999. This obviously involved a huge time commitment from all of the key employees, and we all looked forward to that first Saturday after the convention for some downtime. Yeah, right. About a week before the convention began we got a call from Bush Campaign. They were referred to us by the Union Pacific Railroad; the...

Very busy week, three of my clients are doing food booths at Wawa Welcome America's Taste of Philadelphia event. We have been planning the best items to serve, how to serve them, and how to do it at the lowest cost in order to hopefully make a profit. This is another collection of restaurants serving food, but the twist here is that the event is free to attend, and you pay for sampling size portions of food. Great entertainment is provided, tonight the headliner is Gerald Veasley, he is an amazing jazz bass player. He played in a band called Reverie in the 80's and 90's and we were lucky enough to have them play many nights at our restaurant Bala Rouge in Bala Cynwyd. I just saw Gerald backstage, and I am listening to his band as the sun sets over Center City and boats float by to listen to the sweet sounds, it's a great scene. Tomorrow night Aaaron Neville headlines, it's still free and there are fireworks to end the evening. I got a call from one of the event or...

Well I missed my first weekday blog yesterday, I'll try to do two today to make up for it. I was trying to get more information on the big change at Max & Me Catering (Guest Counts, Culinary Concepts, etc.) but was unsuccessful in finding anything substantial that I felt was of interest. The only additional information at this time is that Jan DeMarzo starts with Max & Me in mid-July and she will be in charge of Culinary Concepts and off-premise catering produced at the Culinary Concepts kitchen under the Max & Me Catering and Gourmetro brands. Another lame excuse for not posting yesterday was I was busy in my garden jury-rigging a trellis for my very vigorous cucumber plants. I'm really enjoying gardening again after a 36 year hiatus. I was really into organic gardening from ages 12-16 when we lived in Northern Bucks County, but then I discovered girls, got my driver's license and gardening lost it's allure. I live in an area of Ambler that is in a flood ...

Inside sources have confirmed a huge development in the Catering World. Max & Me Catering/Guest Counts/Culinary Concepts/Gourmetro have in the last half an hour made a very important internal announcement. They have announced the hiring of Jan DeMarzo as VP of off-premise catering. They also announced that Jim Israel, former owner of Culinary Concepts is "no longer with the company" Jan was formerly with Compass Group where she was VP of East Coast Sales for the Wolfgang Puck Catering brand. The Puck division only recently replaced Restaurant Associates as Compass's operating unit in Philadelphia. I had heard rumors about Ms. DeMarzo's possible departure starting when the Puck changeover was announced, and I was wondering how her style would match with the California based management of Puck. I will write at greater length about this story later this evening. Off to Share our Strength. Harry 6/20/11

When I said I was going to post every day, what I MEANT to say was every weekday. I will only write on the weekends when the mood strikes me and this morning it did. Happy Father's Day. Thinking about my father, Joseph (Jerry) Morton Spivak, 12/9/28-10/5/84. We all miss him very much, especially my daughter Katie, his first grandchild, who he never met. She thinks about Jerry and Sally quite often. I was just getting to really know him when he died, I often feel his presence when I drive through certain areas. He was a child of the depression and was eternally careful with money because of it, although as he became wealthy he did enjoy the things and experiences that became available to him, especially his world famous sewn in pants crease. I need to start putting pictures in my blog, I have some great ones of dad. As I sometimes do on Sunday morning, I think about dad and I decide to head up to Q-Mart in Quakertown. Quakertown is the gateway and closest shopping to where we ...

I love the Battleship New Jersey. Very fond memories from my Max & Me Catering days (pre-Libre Management) of how we were able to become the leading upscale caterer on the USS NJ, and how it became a very important part of our growth strategy. When I joined Max & Me in March of 2000 one of my very first tasks was to write the proposal that would get us the exclusive backstage and VIP catering contract at what was then known as the E-Centre (became Tweeter Center, now Susquehanna Bank Center). As we began catering that season, my brother Jon and I began to realize that the expanding Camden Waterfront would be a fertile area to expand our sales. We were able to cater some great events for Opsail that year and some other Camden fundraisers, but we always set our sites on new venues and we realized that the coming arrival of the USS NJ would be a great addition to the growing list of venues where we could work. Long story short. The Battleship arrived, the contract...

Now that I'm past the Great Chefs event I will start to dig into some of the meatier topics about the business and status of catering in 2011. I want to start with discussing some of the big news in the Philadelphia Region as far as catering for the current year so far. Earlier this year Compass Group changed it's operating unit in Philadelphia from Restaurant Associates to Wolfgang Puck Catering. To hear some in the know tell it, essentially one day they were RA, the next day everybody got new uniforms and they were Puck. I will devote a future post to some more in depth analysis of this, but I am sure there are more significant changes that came and are coming as far as menus, staffing, etc. Max & Me Catering, the firm that I used to be a part of, acquired Culinary Concepts, their venue contracts and infrastructure. Jim Israel has apparently stayed on to be in charge of business development for this division of Guest Counts Hospitality, which is the name that they hav...

The Alex's Lemonade Stand Great Chefs event was better than I expected, and I had great expectations. The venue, Urban Outfitter's Corporate HQ, was perfect for this type of event, huge open space with lots of really nice architectural detail, one of the old Navy Yard buildings that they recycled into a serene environment that is great to hang out in. When I first saw this space about 5 years ago, I drooled at the possibilities for it's utilization as event space, but UO keeps this very limited, as it is their home base. Bringing my daughter Katie to this event gave me a second level of enjoyment, taking in all the offerings and chatting with people myself and showing all this to my daughter and trying to help her enjoy it. Luckily she is a foodie, she will be going to school to study this industry, and she is very social, thus I had very little to do to help her enjoy the evening, other than walk around and introduce her to people I know and wanted to know. I wanted ...

I am so excited to attend this event tonight, and really proud to be bringing my daughter Katie who just graduated from high school and is bound for Johnson & Wales University in Denver. She will be in the Hospitality Management Program, focusing on Special Event and Restaurant Management. This is such a perfect event to take her to, and it will further motivate her for college and her career. I really enjoy attending and producing this type of event and it is a very unique form of catering from the perspective of the event organizer and the individual restaurant or caterer that participates. It is also very difficult to pull off successfully by the standards that most caterers judge themselves. Factors such as having enough food and beverage, keeping lines short, keeping the flow of the event so that guests can access all areas are difficult when there are dozens of individual food and beverage suppliers and many of them are not practiced in transporting, preparing and serving t...

For quite a few years now different clients, associates and friends have suggested that I write a newsletter to share some of my accumulated knowledge of the catering business. I have always liked the idea and put it on my to do list where it would rise and fall in priority but never make it to publication.  Then about a month ago I met with a very respected friend in the event/meeting planning business who I had not seen in about two years. I shared with this person some of the opportunities, trends, changes I was seeing in the catering and special event venue world. This led my friend to suggest that I write a blog. As I left the meeting I realized this was a much better way to proceed with sharing my information than a newsletter, and I began compiling story ideas. Once I had some ideas on initial posts, the hard part became where to start. I figured "what" and "why" would be as good a place as any to start. The above begins to cover why I started this, another...