Inside HBO Max’s The Event: the reality TV show following Wolfgang Puck’s Hollywood catering business to the stars
Usually at events like HBO’s Westworld premiere or the Screen Actors Guild Awards, cameras are trained on celebrities walking the red carpet – but John Watkin and Eamon Harrington turned to the chefs behind the scenes in this new unscripted show
Cooking a meal for a big group is always stressful. So just imagine cooking for over 1,000 guests. Now make those guests white-hot celebrities like Brad Pitt.
Usually cameras are trained on the celebrities at such shindigs, but new HBO Max series The Event shines the spotlight on the cooks and servers toiling behind the scenes. It began airing last week.
“I do think we tend to take catered food completely for granted,” says John Watkin, who with frequent collaborator Eamon Harrington co-directed the documentary series and served as executive producers.
From the Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG) to HBO’s premier party for Westworld, the four-part series shows the intense planning and detail that go into high-profile catering.
With complex dishes and makeshift kitchens, something is bound to go wrong and that’s one of the lessons home cooks can learn from the series – flexibility. As one chef notes: “To me, catering is all about adjusting.”
That was evident last January at the SAG awards in Los Angeles. Puck’s team had created a dish for 1,280 that included pan-roasted chicken with turnip ginger purée and gooseberry salsa verde alongside miso-glazed salmon with sticky rice and sesame cucumbers.
Puck’s caterers quickly cancelled incoming orders of 250 pounds of salmon and 300 pounds of chicken, pivoting to making a paella rice dish with kale and squash, charred baby carrots with a harissa glaze and a bean salad with arugula, olives and baby peppers.