Hotbox

Now in paperback: the beloved Lee Brothers take on the wild, competitive world of high-end catering, exposing secrets of the food business that no home cook or restaurant chef has experienced.

Hotbox exposes the real-life drama that takes place behind cavernous event spaces and soaring white tents, where cooking conditions have more in common with a mobile army hospital than a restaurant and clients tend to be highly emotional and demanding. It's a realm where eccentric characters, working in extreme conditions, must produce magical events, instantly adapting when, for instance, the host's toast runs a half hour too long, a hailstorm erupts, or a rolling rack of hundreds of dessert parfaits goes wheels-up.

The Lee brothers, known for their humane portrayals of uncelebrated food workers for the catering business for four years, learning the culture from the inside out. Now, Matt and Ted take you along for the ride as they dash through black-tie fund-raisers, spot celebrities at a Hamptons cookout, or follow a silverware crew at 3:00 a.m. in a warehouse in New Jersey. Along the way, you'll get to know every facet of this essential industry.

PRAISE FOR HOTBOX
Hotbox is the Kitchen Confidential of the big-ticket catering world.
--The New York Times

Lively...[with] just the right combination of sophistication and self-deprecation [to] show us what really goes on behind the scenes.
--The Wall Street Journal

Fast and furious and funny, Hotbox digs deep into the messy, mad world of catering. It's an absorbing, immersive, appetizing tale, written with sharp intelligence and style.
--Susan Orlean, author of The Library Book

"Hotbox takes you from the frying pan into the fire. The cutthroat world of catered events come to life in this compelling book by the Lee Brothers."
--Tom Colicchio

"Catering chefs and their teams are often the unsung heroes of the culinary world. With compelling storytelling, Matt and Ted Lee take you behind-the-scenes to show the challenges, perseverance, integrity, and work ethic necessary to achieve excellence."
--Drew Nieporent, Restaurateur: Nobu, Bâtard, Tribeca Grill

Who knew that food improv was a thing? Hotbox is wicked and funny as hell. The Lee Bros. journeyed into the lowly outback of haute cuisine--catering--and came out with a new genre, food bouffe.
--Jack Hitt, author of Bunch of Amateurs

"A brilliant, gleeful, fly-on-the-lip-of-a-saucepan narrative, full of tips and secrets, and proof (yet again) that some of our greatest stories are in how we make food. You will never ever take a passed hors d'oeuvre for granted."
--Bill Buford, bestselling author of Heat

The Lee brothers...pull back the curtain on the catering world, an often-dismissed arm of the culinary industry denounced for its 'rubber chicken and dry salmon, ' in this captivating tell-all."
--Publishers Weekly

Readers see behind the scenes of galas to show the conflict between sales teams and kitchen teams, understand the unique challenges of creating restaurant-quality food for a single evening, and meet the major players in the New York event world. The authors' reverence for caterers' work ethic comes through on every page. A mixture of history and memoir, the Lees' investigation offers insights into a segment of the food world that often deliberately keeps itself invisible.
--Booklist