What do you get when you mix Silicon Valley,
Atlantic City, Boardwalk Empire, and a small airport? You get Google's
prestigious Global Partner Summit party that we catered on February 26th for
450 VIP guests. Google came to us with a MISSION – throw a 1920's Prohibition
party, with an 'Atlantic City' themed menu in the main hangar of the Palo Alto
airport.
Close your eyes and imagine a giant room
(industrial and yet classy) filled with staff wearing 1920's style clothing
(lots of hats and suspenders) and a full spread of sumptuous treats, eats, live
music, and gaming tables. You walk-in and are greeted by a bar (about the size
of half a football field) filled with professional bar-tenders slinging bespoke
prohibition themed cocktails. Before you can even decide which cocktail you
want, a team of servers mesmerizes you with platters of passed appetizers.
As
you make your way to the sides of the room you start to realize that there's
STILL MORE – an oyster bar where oyster shuckers pry open cold oysters, a hot-dog
cart serving mini-hot dogs (including a vegan one), a table full of Left
Coast's meat-pies, a full espresso bar, giant bins of salt-water taffy – and
that's only the half-of-it. This wasn't just a party or an event, this was
a choreographed live art-performance with enough moving parts to make
Henry Ford's head spin.
Here's the spread (any and all items can be
incorporated into future menus):
PASSED APPS:
-Fried Mozzarella Bites with tomato basil
sauce (Laurine's Grandma Ruggerio's recipe)
-Crab Cakes with Remoulade (we had to sleep
with 3 Cape Cod sailors to get this recipe)
-Glazed Mini Meatloaf with Whipped Potatoes
(we were luck any of them made it to the guests before the chefs ate them all!)
-Spinach stuffed mushroom (an appetizer favorite that has with stood the
test of time)
-Corn fritter, buttermilk herb sauce (can you say hush puppy?)
-Chicken and Calabrian chili meatballs, vodka tomato cream
sauce
-Beef tenderloin, horseradish
cream, watercress, potato
CARTS/STATIONS:
- Fresh Oysters from HOG island Oyster company
staffed by three professional shuckers (they shuck a dozen oysters before you
can say 'Mignonette')
-Espresso bar with Uncommon Grounds – Molta Roba Blend
-Mini John Morrell 100% beef Hot dogs with toppings: onions and peppers, beef
chili, cheese, red onions, relish, yellow mustard, ketchup
-Hand Pies - Vegetarian wild mushroom pie, parmesan crust
/ Turkey sausage pie, leek, sweet potato, sage crust / Beef and root vegetable
pie, butter crust
-Shrimp Cocktail (think East Coast crab shack - giant cold
shrimp with homemade cocktail sauce)
-Salt water taffy in giant wooden barrels
-Mini cannoli’s
-Blueberry lemon cheesecake bites
-Mini chocolate whoopee pies
BAR MENU
– Southside –
Gin, fresh lime, mint
– Tequila Daisy –
100% agave tequila, fresh lime juice, curacao, agave nectar
– Classic
Manhattan – Rye, sweet vermouth, aromatic bitters
– Sazerac – Rye
whiskey, peychauds bitters, absinthe
– Hemingway
daiquiri – light rum, grapefruit, lime juice, maraschino liquor
– Gimlet- Vodka
or gin, lime, sugar
