The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [126]
When I was growing up, the church my family went to held annual potluck dinners. Part of the fun of the night was a blind ballot: Everyone got to vote on their favorite dish. My dad made his signature pepperoni lasagna each time; some years he won with it, others he lost to more novel entries. But he brought the same dish each year; people at the church had grown to expect it, and my dad was happy to oblige.
Perhaps it pleased him most of all to know that other people enjoyed his food enough to vote for it in a competitive arena. This is the draw for the cook-off fanatic. After attending, competing in, hosting, and judging so many, I’ve learned that recognition and admiration are often unfulfilled needs in the home-cooking sector. It’s not always so much about cooking what one wants to eat but impressing a large number of people, or the judges, enough to win. For instance, strangely enough, my dad never really made his pepperoni lasagna just for us to eat at home.
A Chili Takedown had been scheduled for that August, after a couple of months’ hiatus. Matt Timms had chosen to move the event to a popular bar in Brooklyn called Union Pool and had teamed up with our mutual friend Scott Gold to host the competition. They asked me to be one of their “esteemed” judges, along with a couple of local food luminaries, including chef Camille Becerra and butcher Tom Mylan. I was looking forward to seeing whether all the cook-off excitement I’d seen building recently would amount to something big.
But before that, I had another cooking task to tackle. My friends Darin and Greg, twin brothers who deejayed by the name Finger on the Pulse, introduced a series of parties with barbecue food at a club in Brooklyn called Studio B. They were calling the parties Studio BBQ. For each party, they pulled together a different group of chefs to serve their food to the masses, for a cheap $5 a plate. I went to the first one in June, which had garnered so much hype that it was nearly impossible to move through the outdoor patio where the party was held, let alone dance, and the line for food snaked around the entire place. Fortunately, the space cleared up by the late night, and my friends and I lingered, dancing and for a brief while splashing around in the patio’s decorative wading pools. I think Matt and I were two of the last people to leave.
For their next Studio BBQ at the end of July, Darin and Greg decided to round up a team of “underground” chefs. Despite my behavior at the last barbecue, they asked me to be one of them and got Mark from Whisk and Ladle and our friend Michael from A Razor, A Shiny Knife on the case, too. I had cooked at Michael’s supper club a couple of times by then, and so had Mark, so the three of us knew one another and had cooked together before. This would be our biggest undertaking as a team, though. Instead of making a dinner for twenty to thirty people at a supper club, or even cooking enough chili for one hundred cook-off attendees, Darin and Greg asked us to prepare enough food for four hundred prospective attendees at the next Studio BBQ. The menu was up to us to figure out. Somehow, all of it would be prepared at our homes and brought to the space merely to reheat and serve.
We had a lot of work ahead of us. But something happened shortly into our planning that knocked me off my food-obsessed course for a while, if only in spirit. On the Fourth of July, I went to a backyard barbecue at David and Shana’s place with all of my best friends. We moved on to another friend’s rooftop nearby to catch a clear view