Part 1: OpSail Begins
John F. Kennedy loved sailing. Like, he really, really liked to sail. He liked sailing so much that in 1964 he orchestrated an event called Operation Sail that sent sailing vessels from over 40 Nations on a goodwill tour around the world, bringing festivities and information on sailing and maritime history wherever they went. There have been six of these events through the years, one of which was the largest catering event I’ve ever been a part of.
On June 16, 2000, in Norfolk, VA a massive flotilla of ships called OpSail 2000, led by the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Eagle, came sailing up the Chesapeake Bay and into Norfolk Harbor in front of tens of thousands of waving onlookers. There was a cascade of sailboats and pleasure craft escorting the giant schooners, warships, frigates, sloops, and sailboats as they went from port city to port city around the world. Everywhere they docked there were parties, seagulls, and thousands of tourists coming in from hundreds of miles around for the spectacle. The crews of the ships were obligated to participate in the official festivities but then the ships would be rented out for corporate events, weddings, or just private citizens who wanted to have a party on a pirate ship. For three days and nights, thousands of people partied on the ships docked in the harbor and all of it fell under the domain of Festevents.
Festevents was a Not for Profit Special Events planning company under the city’s umbrella that took care of all of the events for Norfolk, VA and generally ran Town Point Park, the downtown lawn/amphitheater event location by the water. They needed someone to provide catering for all of the parties that were scheduled to happen on the larger ships including kegs, liquor, wine, crudité platters, sandwich platters, meat and cheese trays, and desserts. They were also going to need brown bag breakfast, lunch and dinner for tour groups and staff at dozens of locations around town. The caterer would also have to be able to be a hub for on the fly food needs throughout the weekend. Omar’s Carriage House, owned by Omar Bhoukriss was a small but really lovely boutique restaurant with maybe 30 seats. Somehow Omar managed to pick up the contract for OpSail. $80,000 for 3 days. Big time.
D, aka Scooter, was the Executive Chef of Omar’s Carriage House and my roommate. I worked for Omar part-time in addition to my role as slacker of all trades (bartender/cook/server) at my home restaurant O’Sullivans a few miles away. Scooter had just a year earlier renegotiated his pay with Omar which now included 10% of the gross on all catering orders. Omar was clearly thinking $80 on an $800 order when they wrote the contract but Scooter reasoned this was indeed a catering order and asked Omar when he would receive his $8000. Omar laughed but Scoot was dead serious and made him promise to pay up when the event was over or he was walking. Omar blinked. Then they paid me $10 an hour.
I showed up to work on Friday morning with the rising sun pouring in through the window of the old school lunchroom kitchen we were using for the weekend. The school had been taken over by various other organizations and the kitchen was subleased as needed and available for the groups but for the weekend it was ours. It was less than a quarter mile from most of the docks and had plenty of room for raw food storage. Scooter showed me around and then we stopped in front of a slicer and a pallet of tomatoes, 45 cases of tomatoes on a pallet, he said “we need all of these cut eventually but we could use 4-5 cases right now to start.” This was going to be Army style cooking.
Then he showed me the walk-in cooler. “We don’t have a/c, or any cold bottled water, and the tap water here sucks, and it’s a hundred degrees in here so if you get thirsty,” he opened the door,” just have some of these.” The walk-in was filled with cases of beer, floor to ceiling, front to back, almost all the way to the door. It was 8am and I decided to wait until I had worked on the slicer for a while before starting to drink.
From that point on it was just prep, prep, prep. For the rest of that day we made sandwiches, bag lunches, meat trays, cheese trays, veggie trays, fruit platters, salads and we had runners constantly picking up stacks of 10-20 platters and running them to ships up and down the waterfront. Festevents personnel would stop by to see how things were going in their sky blue polo shirts, lanyards, and hiking boots. They did a lot of planning and walking around but once the events were in motion there wasn’t much left for them to do so they made themselves useful if they could, running sandwiches and bag meals to tour groups. We just kept processing hundreds of pounds of meat, cheese, and veggies…all day in the 100 plus degree kitchen. It was brutal but we were having fun. At the end of the day we wrapped up, cleaned everything up, mopped the floors and had a few beers for the actual enjoyment of it before heading home.
Saturday morning arrived and things were going smooth. We were all laughing and having a good time, production was firing up and by the end of the previous day we had figured out our assembly line system for making hundreds of sandwiches quickly and efficiently; we were now on our game. We were humming along until somewhere during lunchtime when we got a call over the radio from Karen, the Festevents Director, that they had a hundred people from a tour group who got scheduled for a lunch break at the Chinese Pagoda, but the person that scheduled that stop didn’t know the Pagoda didn’t serve food anymore. They were stranded and hungry and needed a hundred bag lunches. Right now. Omar told us about the rush job and from behind me I heard “someone’s gonna get fiii-red”. We laughed and got to work.
I have never seen so much food go from one state to the other. We had just finished making the hundreds of meals and platters we had prepped for and flew into slicing another couple cases of meat, a few more blocks of cheese and throwing down 50 pieces of bread on the giant prep table we put together out of 6 huge other prep tables. One person was adding mayo, another throwing slices of ham, another on tomatoes and lettuce, and Omar coming in behind throwing down the top bread…this was military efficiency in action and we had Karen’s meals ready when she came to pick them up. Sandwiches wrapped, in bags, with fruit and a goddamn drink. When Omar smiled and chided Karen, telling her he would add it to the bill, you could see the steam pour from her ears. I had a feeling she felt she was over paying for the event…it also felt like Omar’s Carriage House was the only restaurant in town that wanted anything to do with this beast, so…stalemate.
We kept prepping for the evening deliveries, which were almost twice as many as the previous night, with new ships having come in during the day adding new venues. We had to go scout a location for a party and took a few minutes to wander around the docks and take in how big this event really was. These ships were monsters…even the little ones towered over the docks with their masts dripping with sails, nets, and ropes. I felt like a little kid and I wanted so bad to jump on one of the ships and scamper like a monkey up the masts.
A sign in front of one of the ships caught my eye. It read “Hiring Cook. Inquire on board.”
No fucking way.
I looked at Jason, a friend and cook who, like me, had been drafted by Scooter to work OpSail as a drone. Before we scouted the new ship venue I said “I’m checking this out.” And I climbed the walkway onto the ship with the “Hiring Cook. Inquire on board” sign and was greeted by one of the mates. We introduced ourselves and started into questions.
“Hey man, so what can you tell me about this cook position? I think I might be curious.”
“Well, the food budget you get to work with is about $5 per person, per day, for as long as we’re out on a tour, which could last anywhere from 5 days to 2-3 weeks. We pull into ports of call around the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and South America and you go shopping for meals for the guests and crew. You keep the dry stores stocked, and you get to make whatever you want, with input from the rest of the crew and the guests who book the trip. We can also fish from the boat so you can stretch your budget and play with the freshest seafood around. We’re always picking up fresh local produce wherever we land and food is really cheap. There’s 7 crew and between 2 and 8 guests so you have a minimum of $45 bucks a day to feed 9 people breakfast lunch and dinner which is a lot where we’re going. When you’re not cooking, cleaning, or keeping the galley straight you work as a deckhand with the other crew and work the sails or take turns on the wheel. Its hard work and totally unpredictable but it’s a lot of fun. And you’re sailing around the Caribbean on a frigate. It’s amazing.”
I was hooked. I was so in. I wanted to go home, say good-bye to my cat and pack my shit. Unfortunately we had work to do but I asked another question. “When do you guys leave? Like if I was interested what do I do here?”
“We’re shipping out tomorrow night and if we have a cook great, if not we’ll keep looking. If you want to try it out come back tomorrow and talk to the captain but be ready to take off!”
On the way back to the school kitchen Jason said “You want to do that don’t you? Take off and cook on some boat?”
“FUCK YEAH I DO!” I burst out, “I need to think about this.”
“Well you have until tomorrow, but it sounds like you’re already on that boat.”
“I really need to think about this.”