Ordinarily, being summoned to the boardroom during the daily two o’clock meeting isn’t a good thing. It means, in general, one of two things: someone in some department has an issue with one of your programs either in house or over the next three days, or you have business in over the next three days you’ve forgotten about otherwise you’d have been in the two o’clock meeting instead of sitting at your desk. Much as I hate to admit to it, I’ve experienced the latter more than once, several years ago when we were so busy it was all we could do to keep track of the next three minutes. So when Casey called me on her cell phone and said I needed to get in there, it was unsettling.
At least until I walked in and discovered the reason for the summons. Petra, our new Executive Pastry Chef, was unveiling her newest creation, something absolutely indescribably fabulous called a Guava Mirage and everyone seated around the board table had a plate in front of them. I took the last one from the rack and found a seat at the end of the table.
“You’re going to eat that?” Casey was incredulous. “You don’t eat sweets.”
“It’s guava,” I offered, as if that explained everything. It also slightly resembled ice cream, which is about the only sweet I will indulge in, although not very often. This, however, I wasn’t going to let pass me by. It was a pale pink/plum colored perfectly shaped half dome the consistency of ice cream and mousse with a paper thin square of chocolate atop a thin flaky pastry base, flanked by three raspberries and parked on the shores of two shallow ponds of white and dark chocolate crème fraiche. My spoon dug into it and it was softer than ice cream, sturdier than mousse. The pastry crumbled perfectly, picking up just a bit of the white chocolate and a raspberry, completing a first bite that made me a firm believer in the Guava Mirage. It was absolutely incredible. Three bites into it, I was already thinking of pitching it to my Chapter Thirteen Trustee group in February and deciding my United Food Retailers Association could make this the signature dessert for their next program. Four bites into it, much of the dome still standing, I had to push the plate away. I’d tried enough to fall in love with it but I knew Petra too well already. There had to have been enough calories in it to constitute an entire meal and unless I wanted my thighs to also be the consistency of mousse it was time to push the plate away.
I was unsurprised yesterday to learn that next week we’re going to Parker City for lunch and to drink whiskey all afternoon and oddly enough, this is also all in a day’s work. We’re looking at carrying this particular vendor’s whiskeys and vodkas on our bars in 2010, so it’s important that we’re all familiar with what they are, how they’re made, and how they taste. There are also several new wines hitting the new menu so an upcoming tasting there is in the works, as well. These events, we have some forewarning on. It doesn’t always work that way.
Last fall I was passing by the banquet office when the Beverage Director waved me over to a bar, set up by the north end loading area. On it were dozens of martini glasses, containing a rainbow of flavored concoctions. “We’re trying to come up with a signature martini for AmNature,” she explained, referring to a large convention due in the next two weeks. “Try these, see what you like better.”
Something only slightly short of seriously tipsy later, we’d settled on two, and I went back to whatever it was I’d been doing, not thinking it strange at all, after doing this kind of work for so long, that I’d drink cocktails at three in the afternoon and just be doing my job.
At this week’s regular Thursday Food and Beverage meeting, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the board tables almost completely covered by trays of tea sandwiches, hors d’oeuvres, and seafood. “New lounge menu,” our Operations Director announced. “We need some feedback from everyone.” So it was that our role in that meeting was to make an effort to sample everything, the result of which was sixteen people seated in front of 16 plates, each one laden with food items which had only one bite out of them. Even at that, by the time the meeting was over I walked out with that “Now I need a serious nap” feeling I generally only get after a particularly good Thanksgiving meal.
The new breakfast menu in our restaurant saw the Operations Director coming through our office at nine a.m., breaking us up into groups of three and telling us we had to find a day that week where we could arrange to go to the restaurant in the morning, order breakfast from the new menu, everyone selecting a different item, and ‘give us some feedback on it’. This didn’t seem strange, either, just another thing to be done and checked off the To Do list.
My boss Liz is now talking about all the new hors d’oeuvres making their debut in the new convention menus and how important it’s going to be that we try them. Not, she said, noting the look on my face just then, all at once as we’d done the previous year (a disaster of gastric proportions. We’d anticipated a regular Food and Beverage Meeting, not a surprise buffet the immensity of which made our annual Thanksgiving Brunch look like a light reception), maybe just one menu item per day during the regular two o’clock meeting. Which would mean we’d basically be having another lunch two hours after lunch, every day for about the next thirty days.
Add to this the regular call from the banquet kitchen to our office, the chef announcing he’s ‘playing around with the risotto cookers, making quesadillas with them trying to design a new station’, or ‘perfecting the new granola pancakes’ and he ‘needs a few people to come down and try them’ and the by now ubiquitous platter of breakfast burritos he deposits in our break room because he ‘made too many’ and you have the perfect logic behind my response to last week’s intern when she asked, “Don’t you get tired of all the running around you do when you have a group in? That’s hours on your feet.”
“Are you kidding me?” I’d responded, “we love it. We love every minute of it.”
Which I’m sure she took to mean that we were all the most dedicated, loyal, incredible Convention Managers she’d ever met and I let her believe that.
When you’re dealing with youthful enthusiasm of that immense proportion, it wouldn’t be right to voice the truth that all that running around is the only way to keep up with the requirements of your job and remain the same skirt size.
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