August 4, 2005 | Read Time: 8 minutes
Roberto Donna, a prominent chef in the nation’s capital, lends his name to about 20 charity benefit dinners around the country every year. But lately the owner of Galileo restaurant has started to notice some disturbing trends at many of the soirees he attends.
During one dinner party he helped set up for a large national health charity last year, he prepared five courses of food, donated his restaurant’s largest dining room, and then got stuck paying tips out of his own pocket to the waiters after charity officials left without doing so. His costs for the night, including income his restaurant lost: more than $16,000.
But what dismays Mr. Donna even more than the expenses some chefs are increasingly expected to take on is the way people running events sometimes treat those preparing the food. When Mr. Donna shows up to cook meals at fancy hotels and restaurants, he often finds inadequate parking and valet services. That means he must park blocks away and wheel his jumbo-size Igloo cooler — which can weigh up to 100 pounds packed with cookware, knives, bottles of wine, oil and vinegar, and Ziploc bags carrying fresh herbs, spices, and marinating filet mignons — through busy city streets. And if he wants anything to eat or drink while he sweats through hours of prep work in unfamiliar kitchens and banquet halls, he had better bring it himself, because hosts rarely provide anything.
“Chefs are often the major attraction at these events,” Mr. Donna said over a bottle of San Pellegrino water in his kitchen one afternoon a few days before a charity dinner. “But they are treated like the help.”
If Mr. Donna and more than a dozen of the best-known chefs in the nation’s capital get their way, charity officials will start treating the people who work behind the scenes at their events much better than some do now.
The idea of improving the working conditions at fund-raising events started with a chance dinner a few famous chefs shared after a big gala a few years ago. The chefs discovered that they shared similar concerns about the restaurant business, leading them to form a club for local cooks that meets informally once a month at one of their restaurants.
In many cities, chefs keep to themselves and guard their recipes and ideas as closely as foreign state secrets. In Washington, where ambassadors often discuss highly sensitive matters at dinners along Embassy Row, chefs behind closed doors there and at other events snap towels at each other, stick forks in one another’s dishes to sample different tastes and borrow ideas, and make plans to meet up after work to smoke cigars and swap stories.
That was the scene at a recent event featuring 17 of D.C.’s best-known chefs, who came together to put on a benefit dinner for one of their own. All of the money raised during the evening would go toward the care and medical treatment of Phillip Swenson, the 2-year-old autistic son of Karin and Jim Swenson, who is the chef at the Fourth Estate restaurant at the National Press Club. And the evening’s activities, which were organized by the chefs themselves, gave them a chance to show off how a benefit dinner should be run.
An hour before some of Washington’s wealthiest patrons started flowing into a ballroom at the Park Hyatt hotel to indulge in poached Chincoteague oysters with baby spinach and caviar, among other culinary inventions, Michel Richard, the chef at Citronelle, one of the city’s most-renowned restaurants, burst through the doors carrying a white chef’s coat folded neatly in his arms.
“Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy!” cried the round-bellied Frenchman, who was serving as the evening’s emcee. “How you stay so skinny?”
Mr. Richard (pronounced “ree-SHAR”) wandered the room, grabbing pinches of food, kissing cheeks, and cracking jokes. “A girl ask me the other day, ‘Are you the chef here?’” he said through a thick French accent to a table of colleagues as he put on his jacket. “What do I look like?”
Prep stations were set up in the shape of a U in the center of the ballroom, where the chefs were on display for dinner patrons as people began to trickle into the room. Each chef had his or her own space in which to work and plenty of room for a trail of sous-chefs to operate.
Toward one end of the room, Brian McBride, the chef at Melrose restaurant, which is located in the host hotel, delicately layered a tuna tartare with daikon radish on top of seaweed. Hunched over the plates, which were shaped like fish, Mr. McBride carefully spooned out wasabi-seasoned tobiko — fish eggs from Barbados — then drizzled reduced soy sauce over his creation.
“Nice plate,” said Kaz Okochi, chef of Kaz Sushi Bistro, admiring from an adjacent station.
“Thank you,” Mr. McBride said.
Near the center of the room, Mr. Donna, Mr. Richard, and Robert Wiedmaier, the chef at Marcel’s, sat around a table planning a summer trip they are taking together to Napa Valley.
The talk then turned to other charity benefits, and all three chefs agreed that they have gotten frustrated after donating their services and restaurant space to groups that have taken advantage of their generosity, treated them poorly at events, and not followed up afterward to let them know how much money was raised and what specific charitable purpose it was used for.
Chefs are partly to blame when problems occur at fund-raising dinners, they agreed, because chefs get so busy they forget to make their needs clear upfront with charity officials. They said they are considering making requests in writing before events take place to make sure they get what they want.
“If chefs don’t take care of themselves,” Mr. Wiedmaier said, “no one will.”
Near the other end of the room, Francesco Ricchi, the chef at Cesco Trattoria, in Bethesda, Md., was putting the final touches on a crab risotto whose rich aroma was getting overtaken by the smell of bacon sizzling in another chef’s pan. Holding a shiny Porsche knife — the blade most chefs in the room were using — Mr. Ricchi sliced a handful of roma tomatoes, emptying the seeds with one efficient turn of the wrist, then slivered a pile of asparagus, from time to time flipping a piece into his mouth.
Mr. Ricchi grew up in Florence, Italy, and learned to cook by helping out in a restaurant his family owned. He moved to Washington after his son was born with Down syndrome 21 years ago.
“I decided to come here to give my son a better life,” he says. “He has gotten better care here.”
But it hasn’t come cheap. He said that insurance covers only a fraction of what it costs to care for children who require extraordinary medical attention, like his son and the Swenson’s toddler.
Phillip Swenson has a form of autism called pervasive developmental disorder; at age 2, he is just starting to babble and coo. It costs his parents about $2,000 each month to provide the minimum level of care he needs.
The money raised from the evening’s event would go toward additional therapy for Phillip that could help reduce the likelihood that he will need continued medical care as he gets older.
By charging $150 per person, the chefs had already brought in about $25,000 before the bidding began for several items put up for auction. Up first: a private cooking class with Mr. Donna.
Two bidders emerged, and the price edged past $2,000. Then Fred Aryan, who owns a local delivery business, raised the stakes: “Three-thousand!” he yelled.
“Going once, going twice, sold!” Mr. Richard bellowed.
Not content, Mr. Donna rushed the stage and grabbed the mike. Turning to the losing bidder, he said, “If you want it for $3,000, we do it for you, too.” Egged on by the crowd, the second bidder agreed.
A rock-fishing trip with Mr. Wiedmaier and Jeff Buben, the chef at Vidalia and Bistro Bis, which included a boat trip on the Chesapeake Bay and a night broiling the catch, went for $2,200, and several other private dinners also brought in substantial amounts.
But the biggest catch of the night came when Mr. Richard and Mr. Donna stood on stage and described their annual trip to Italy to taste white truffles, which they planned to share this year with the person who handed over the most cash to the Swensons.
The trip includes coach airfare, lodging, and as much wine and truffles as a person can eat. “We eat truffle for breakfast, truffle for lunch, truffle in afternoon,” Mr. Richard said. “And white truffle are not cheap!”
Mr. Aryan again emerged as the top bidder, this time donating $12,000 for the European getaway for two. He later said he planned to take his fiancée along.
As the chefs packed up their belongings, rolling everything tightly in cellophane, another donor, Joanna Wilbur, a retirement planner for a credit union, sat quietly at a table while guests cleared out of the room.
Showing off a menu she had asked every chef to sign, Ms. Wilbur said the evening’s activities were well worth the $750 she donated for five seats for herself, her husband, and three friends. She was pleased to hear that the event netted more than $55,000 to help pay for the medical needs of Phillip Swenson.
“I work with a young man with autism,” Ms. Wilbur said. “He went to college, he goes to happy hour — I know what can happen if you get the right care. I told his parents everything is going to be fine.”
