Catering to the Masses

The list. It's Monday, time for John Nicely to make a grocery list. He's serving dinner on Saturday, so he'll need a few things. Let's see, 150 pounds of steak and chicken. Eighty pounds of noodles. Ingredients for 48 gallons of shrimp bisque, 400 sushi rolls, and 25 pounds of jambalaya and succotash. Plus a couple hundred pizzas and a couple thousand hot dogs.

And lasagna for Shaq, just in case. You can't leave the big guy hungry, right?

That pretty much goes for the other 19,600 guests, too.

You see, Nicely is executive chef at the American Airlines Arena in Miami. A few days from now, basketball's Shaquille O'Neal and the Miami Heat will take on the Seattle SuperSonics. And Nicely will take on one of food service's toughest jobs: He and his team will deliver restaurant-quality meals and top-grade fast food to a sold-out stadium crowd--and do it in the span of a couple of hours.

This is bread and butter for Nicely's employer, Levy Restaurants. Already this year, it has fed the masses at the Super Bowl, the Grammys, and the NBA All-Star Game. It catered last year's World Series and the MTV Video Music Awards, plus hundreds of regular-season games of football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and NASCAR races. This month, it takes on the Kentucky Derby for a fifth year. That's 350,000 guests--and 63,000 jumbo shrimp.

How do you feed huge crowds good food in a short time? It takes outrageous preparation, relentless pursuit of creativity, and a knack for improvisation. Levy brings fanatical attention to detail to 70 sports and convention venues--just as it does at its 18 restaurants. It also brings its chefs, drilled not just in food prep but in the high art of resilience. "The arena," Nicely says, "is its own beast." But when something goes wrong in the heat of the moment--and with events of this scale, something usually does--his people don't melt down. They rise to the occasion.

Saturday | 1 p.m. Six and a half hours before game time, Nicely checks on the main kitchen. The cooks call him Chef John, or simply Chef. He's 32, point-guard short, with black-rimmed glasses, close-cropped black hair and goatee, and a studious, unflappable demeanor. He's no stranger to the intensity of a restaurant. As a boy, he spent summers pitching in at his grandfather's seafood place in Tennessee, peeling potatoes.

For Levy, the game is well under way. Has been for days. Between now and tip-off, each minute counts, so everything is mapped out--the order in which food gets "fired" in the ovens (meat first, then veggies); cooking times and temperatures; which portable heating storage units, or hot boxes, go to which suites or venues.

The kitchen is busy but in no way chaotic. Claudio Daniels, a rangy kid with a perpetual lopsided grin, dunks marinated chicken in buttermilk batter by the handful. Jonathan Capo, one of the wide-eyed rookies, gives the hollandaise sauce a workout with his whisk. And senior sous chef Daniel Martin, tall and bald with a goatee, like the Heat's Alonzo Mourning, assesses the sweet perfume of lobster bisque in the 60-gallon tilt skillet they call Clarisse.

The scene strikes Nicely as "nice and calm. Just the way I like it." Leave the red-faced hyperventilation to Heat coach Pat Riley. Nicely stays cool. He tastes, tweaks, and makes sure everything is on schedule. A longtime chess player, he routinely thinks several moves ahead.

In the days before the Sonics game, his staff prepared whatever it could, chopping vegetables, marinating meats, mixing salad dressings--everything but firing the food. (Levy doesn't cook ahead of time and reheat on game day, a common shortcut. It damages the texture and taste.) At the same time, Nicely began another grocery list for Monday's game against Toronto, and one for a Queen concert three days later.

For the Super Bowl in Detroit, Levy kicked the planning up a couple of notches. Eleven months before the game, chefs and operations managers began compiling a massive checklist called the Grid. The Grid tells all: It shows not just that you need 1,000 pounds of fresh roasted poblano peppers, but which supplier can deliver the right peppers with the right taste and texture and get them to the arena on time. To increase cooking capacity, Levy brought in a tractor trailer with 14 ovens from its NASCAR team, and a refrigerated truck for cold storage. It also assigned a team to handle the unexpected, last-minute events called "pop-ups"--from distributing bottled water to several thousand security personnel to breakfast at 2 a.m. for the Good Morning America crew.

This evening's menu is based on the ingredients left over from another event (in this case, lobster shells, perfect for a bisque); which fish or produce vendors said is top-notch; and, most important, creative impulse--the urge to do something impressive that sports fans won't expect.