Occasions Field Trip

For our first field trip, students with the best attendance records from the Columbia Heights and the Chinatown classes got a real treat: an afternoon excursion to Occasions Catering. Occasions Catering is an upscale catering outfit that furnishes food for all sorts of swanky DC events-- weddings, political events, bar mitzvahs, and everything else in between. As students learned, however, creating the tasty appetizers and impeccably constructed pastries is only a fraction of the work of being a caterer. During our backstage tour, our host, and co-founder, Mark Michael led students through warehouses stacked high with plates, bowls and dishes used for the event. Hot boxes and cold boxes for transporting food to the event location took up entire rooms, speaking to the volume of food, and the challenge presented by the deceptively basic task of transporting food from point A to point B.

In some cases, however, Mark demonstrated that the simplest solution is often the best. It could potentially be one person's full time job to track, sort, and match the prepped food items with the correct order. Add to that a diverse kitchen of Occasions chefs, many of whom speak English as a second language, and there's a huge potential for a costly food mix up. Instead, Mark told us how he quickly learned to color code each of the orders with a small round sticker. All the food that belonged to that order is then tagged with the same color sticker and thus easily identifiable for all staff.

After Mark's informative macro-view of how a catering business is run, students tried their hand at some of the detail-oriented work that goes into many catered food items. Chef Emily showed students a low-stress way to create beautifully decorated sugar cookies and how to roll pastry bags out of parchment paper.

Chefs Sina and Santiago gave students pointers as they carefully patted out foccacia dough for mini pizzas. When we finally left the cavernous Occasions kitchen, each student had a warm pizza tucked under one arm and a bag of cookies under the other. It was just the pick up we all needed for the short, blustery walk back to the Fort Totten station.