Wed Dreams: The Reception

Tom met Andy nearly 20 years ago. They’re both vegetarians and practicing Buddhists. Both sweet guys with good taste. Tom and Andy met the Hot Knives blog about 2 months ago when they wrote to us about catering their wedding. We sat down for wine and menu chit-chat when they dropped the bomb, “It’s not one event, but two… back-to-back… at two different locations.”
Well, we lived to retell that unfunny punch line. Last weekend’s festivities went off like a sometimes-terrifying, often beautiful, sweaty 12-hour dream thanks to the 10-deep crew of blank-clad darlings we hired for help. We’ll tell it you in 2 parts using camera flashes from Molly and Aubrey.


There’s a rolling green grass knoll behind their Zen Center where Tom and Andrew got married. Lady priests waved incense and robed friends hammered copper gongs. The weather was 75 degrees in the sun. Under white tents, Madeline and Jennifer mixed handmade ginger-syrup tonics with lime zest and poured spiced cider. Lake and Jess served oozey sheep and cow cheese from cold marble slabs. Evan and Alex, and our hired thug/sous-chef/lucky charm Mike D. put the finishing touches on the reception goodies in the zen ladies’ full-service kitchen that sat not ten feet behind the raised platform where the guys were to wed. With the kitchen windows open we could hear them prepping for the ceremony while we rolled chevre in nutmeg and formed risotto-sage balls for frying. Ball jokes ensued. Right before the service, one of the buddhists told us, “Your big problem is going to be that we can hear everything you say in there.”


When the last gong landed, we flung open the screen doors and shot out platters of Nicoise tapenade in potato cups, smokey Muhammara piped on lavash points garnished with pomegranate seeds, cider-rubbed goat cheese on apple slices and, of course, the infamous Risotto Arancini with molten fontina centers (every wedding has to have one dish that the waiters get assaulted in a corner over). Little angel-kids ran around the grass while middle-aged ladies in hats slurped ginger soda and older guys gorged on cocktail nuts. They cut the cake. That was our cue, so we started cleaning in a mad frenzy, flinging half-prepared pots of food into our cars along with 4, still-rising pans of perfect sourdough- herb Focaccia. It took 10 minutes, a cigarette and 2 pieces of wintermint gum, to burn down Wilshire to the Park Plaza near McArthur Park where the champagne was supposed to pop in two hours for the sit-down 8-course vegetarian tasting menu.
The first event had gone an hour longer than we expected. Our sous chef Mike needed to jet for a play production in which he stars as Frank Zappa. One of the hotel’s ovens was kaput. For a while – just a second there – we looked in each others eyes and knew shit was close to going horribly wrong…



To be continued…