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Dec. 28, 2007
Columbia Catering Serves Food for Thought
In an industrial kitchen deep in the basement of Lerner Hall, John Santiago begins searing the first of 150 sea bass filets in a 14-inch skillet. It is 10 a.m., and five clipboards hang from hooks above the nearby prep table, each holding several menus for 30 events to be catered on this late November day. They include a gourmet sandwich lunch for 10 at the Law School, an administrative dinner for 150 at Faculty House, sandwiches for 175 and a healthy lunch buffet for an event at the Libraries.
This is a regular day for Santiago, Columbia Catering’s executive chef. On most days, he and his staff of seven sous-chefs prepare meals for 20 to 25 events on the Morningside campus and sometimes the medical center, from small departmental breakfasts to Low Library awards dinners to commencement week buffets for 3,000. The kitchen’s creations are trundled on carts across Morningside by the department’s seven porters and six delivery people. Santiago also is responsible for Faculty House, which serves some 700 meals per day, not counting special events.
“It’s chaos, but it’s completely ordered chaos,” says Santiago, immaculately dressed in a pressed chef’s jacket with his name embroidered on it in Columbia blue, a toque atop his head. As in even the smallest kitchen, the key is preparation. For Columbia’s largest events, Santiago brings in extra chefs and starts everyone slicing, dicing and preparing two to three days ahead. Everything is fresh, nothing frozen, and the kitchen staff makes its own stock in gargantuan 40-gallon vats.
Turning out thousands of meals a day is a piece of cake for this 1984 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. The New Jersey native trained at The River Cafe and Le Bernardin and then worked in the kitchen at the Plaza Athénée Hotel before being named executive chef at The RIHGA Royal Hotel where Thanksgiving meant turning out 2,400 turkey dinners. (The key to not over-cooking turkey is to take it out of the oven when it reaches 165 degrees and let it sit in its own juices for 15 minutes.)
When Columbia approached Santiago for the job four years ago, one of his biggest concerns was whether the kitchen had the right equipment. The kitchen now has the space it needs, along with bigger walk-in refrigerators, to house the day’s deliveries from butchers, fishmongers and produce vendors, as well as 25-pound bags of onions, industrial-size jars of mayonnaise and box after box of kosher salt.
Restaurant kitchens are notorious as places where temperatures, and tempers, are known to flare. Not so with Santiago, who says he works best under pressure, and whose kitchen here is noisy but stays calm. Long hours are expected during the busiest season, but this is not a kitchen of screamers.
A week later, Santiago is preparing yet another meal, this time a luncheon for the trustees at their quarterly meeting. For this event, he and his staff start work a day ahead, preparing a number of recipes, including one of his signature dishes, lobster ravioli. “The bottom line is everything gets done,” Santiago says. “Don’t ask me how, but it gets done.”
- Story by Bridget O'Brian. Photograph by Eileen Barroso.
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