A New Crop of Caterers Carries on a Nashville Tradition

Roadies, bartenders at Brown’s Diner and elderly relatives all have great stories. But have you ever talked to a caterer? They cook like they’re Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in the desert — but, you know, without the meth or the luxury of an RV. 

Caterers swoop into abandoned warehouses and empty fields with their knives and nerves — both made of steel — to MacGyver kitchens out of thin air. They deal with brides and moms on the brink of their biggest and most stressful moments. And then they serve dinners for hundreds of people simultaneously under schedules monitored by the minute (like, first course out at 7:07 p.m.).

Authors Matt and Ted Lee wrote a recent book about the catering underworld. Hotbox: Inside Catering, the Food World’s Riskiest Business raises blood pressure by page 2 of Chapter 1. 

“To be in catering, you have to be totally unflappable,” says Molly Martin of Juniper Green, a catering and events company that launched in fall 2017. “No matter how organized you are, shit goes wrong. It’s stressful as hell.”

Nashville has a strong history of catering. Longtime Nashvillians can cite their favorite caterers like they’re naming hairstylists or music venues. But just as the city’s restaurant scene has changed with new establishments and chefs, there’s a new school of caterers, too. And they’re not here to replace — just to add something fresh and help dispel stereotypes. 

“Everybody’s had dry-ass chicken at a wedding,” says Martin. But times have changed. Martin, who worked many years as a chef in restaurants around town, offers food that’s seasonal, creative and surprising. 

Chef Julia Sullivan of Germantown restaurant Henrietta Red also entered the catering game a few months ago with her company The Party Line. While her restaurant continues to buzz, she spent a recent Saturday setting up a makeshift kitchen in the back of Marathon Music Works in a room labeled “Storage.” Amid an old sofa, several ladders and outdoor heat lamps looming like off-duty security guards, she fashioned a U-shaped workspace of 8-foot tables for plating. She brought in hotboxes, speed racks, a handwashing station, hundreds of platters and clear Cambro containers holding a rainbow of ingredients, arranged by course in Tetris configurations. 

“Every space is so different,” says Sullivan, cool and unfazed. 

With seven back-of-house staff and 22 front-of-house, she sent out multiple plates — octopus salad, beef short rib with braised collards, schnitzel-style monkfish — to a glittery crowd at The Art Ball, a fundraiser with a planned attendance of 300 that grew unexpectedly to 350 two days before the event.

Details had been planned months in advance. To match the bright colors and mirrored pyramid decor of the event, Sullivan and her team molded butter — colored in a trippy kaleidoscope of green from spirulina and purple from red cabbage — into mini individual pyramids for fresh bread. Servers prowled the room pre-event like worker ants in a busy attempt to transform the room from a wide-open rock club to a moody, candlelit event space. Meanwhile, the chefs stayed quiet and calm in the back, tasting, salting and moving like water over rocks in a constant but steady steam. The team placed tiny tangerine leaves on top of jellied carrot puree with chile-lime salt. French-style macarons that looked like cookies in hues of pink had been colored by beets and filled with black sesame fluff. The musty storage room took on the aroma of fresh bread warming in the hotboxes, with bright herbs, olives, lemon and garlicky chile oil arrayed in the colors of a late-stage sunset. Tucked in a different corner of the space, pastry chef Caitlyn Cox (who describes her style as “modern grandma”) piped neon pom-pom icing onto cakes and filled eggshells with neon key lime.

And though the night involved detail to the extreme, the evening prior Sullivan and team had catered a totally different event — a sweet-16th birthday at Belmont Mansion. The following Wednesday they’d cook for 400 more at an event at OZ Arts Nashville. 

So why do it? 

“I’ve always done it — mostly to support myself in between jobs,” Sullivan says, recalling her days working in Manhattan before returning to her hometown of Nashville. She also kept getting catering requests through the restaurant, but didn’t have the space to fulfill orders. (She has an 8-by-8-foot walk-in fridge at the restaurant with fresh shellfish coming in six days a week.) She now rents catering space in the kitchen at Schermerhorn Symphony Center, which had been sitting empty.

“It seemed like enough demand to justify exploring it.”

Though she’s still scaling the company to afford essential expenses (like trucks and a regular dishwasher), Sullivan knows the potential. During research, she trailed a catering and events company in Houston that brings in $9 million a year. 

But more than all that, catering offers chefs an opportunity to collaborate with vendors and clients to create customized experiences and truly make people’s big days even more special.

“It’s the last place people [will still] put away their phones and be together, making memories — bridal showers, funerals, new babies, milestones,” says Martin.

Martin says she once showed up to a 200-person wedding with food that should have already been cooked — instructions on two different jobs had been flipped by accident. She was at a remote location in Gallatin with no kitchen to finish the food. She rallied her team, and they networked it. They borrowed strangers’ homes and space at a barbecue joint. Cocktail hour only had to be pushed 30 minutes, and by the end of the night, the mother of the bride had Martin in an emotional embrace. 

The stories go on and on, including a classic from the late legendary chef Phila Hach, who catered a dinner at the East Tennessee home of famed Roots author Alex Haley. Chess and fudge pies had been specifically requested, but reaching Knoxville, she realized she didn’t have them — hundreds of slices were missing, mistakenly loaded into the wrong vehicle. Hach simply pulled over at a Kroger and announced she’d need to borrow their bakery for a minute. She banged out the pies and made it to the venue on time with desserts still warm, filling the venue with their rich perfumes. The organizers raved and called her a magician for keeping the pies hot while traveling across the state. 

They never even knew the half of it.