THE CATERING RACE : The Catering Race

He’s a caterer. Which, I suppose, explains why he’s constantly cheek-to-jowl with Liz and Dick and the Beatles and the rest of that fast crowd.

--The Partygoer, Los Angeles Times West Magazine, 1968

As Los Angeles’ most famous valet parker (he even has secret service clearance), Chuck Pick has seen more than his share of parties in this town. Hot parties. Dull parties. Parties where one or more of the guests ends up in the pool. And he knows, though he doesn’t like to say, exactly who’s in and who’s out in the catering biz. “I work with all of them,” he says, “so I can’t bad-mouth any of them.”

But that doesn’t stop caterers from bad-mouthing each other. “Randy Fur Ball” is one name some caterers have bestowed upon long-time party planner Randy Fuhrman. (He’s not technically a caterer, but takes business away from other full-service companies.) “The Bar Mitzvah Queen,” is how some dismiss caterer Gai Klass.

“This is a highly competitive business,” says Ray Henderson of Rococo catering. “We bid against each other all the time.”

“We all need to be respectful toward each other,” says Mary Micucci of Along Came Mary, who bristles at the backbiting--and even the notion of competition. “Competitors?” she says, “I don’t like that word. I think we’re all just in a similar business.”

“Oh, Mary would stand on her head just like Cal Worthington to keep Rococo from getting a job,” Henderson says.

The competition has become so cutthroat that Fuhrman--he boasts he was once given as a gift to Barbra Streisand--was thrown out of a party he’d been invited to a while back because the caterer was afraid he would steal their ideas. “I am flattered,” says Fuhrman. “They think I am that big of a threat.”

Catering is big business in Southern California: Corporate lunches. Charity benefits. Wrap parties after the shooting of a movie. Film premieres. Of course, weddings, anniversaries and bar mitzvahs. And clients pay dearly. A party for 1,000 guests can easily run $100,000 or more.

Even with the recession, forecasters predict that in 1993, catering sales will reach $2.7 billion, up 4% from last year.

“The problem,” says Hallee Gould of the catering company Somerset, “is that the market is saturated with caterers.”

It wasn’t always this way. “I remember when there was really just one caterer,” Pick says. That would be Casserole Catering’s Bob Leberman, who went into the party business in 1946. Before Leberman, the stars and society party-givers just called their favorite restaurant--usually Chasen’s or Perino’s--and had food sent over.

“Leberman was really the one who took catering to a different level,” Pick says. He provided not just food, but the silver and the servers--the ambience. He was L.A.’s first full-service caterer. Then, in 1953, the legendary Milton Williams entered the scene. He supplied glamour and elegance for his Hollywood customers, and was so chic he had an unlisted telephone number.

Through most of the ‘80s the L.A. party market was dominated by a group of catering companies that some call the Big Four: Along Came Mary, Ambrosia, Rococo and Somerset. If there was a major party to be planned, odds were one of the Big Four would get the job. And for years, there were plenty of parties to go around.

“Mary is the biggest in the city and probably makes the most money,” Fuhrman says. “That’s fine with me. I don’t want to have 30 employees and be crazy.”

“Anything that Judy Ovitz (wife of agent honcho Michael Ovitz) is doing,” says Ambrosia’s David Corwin, “Mary gets.”

Along Came Mary’s Micucci worked her way up to the top by starting an all-female bartending service 17 years ago. Today her company supplies food and decor at major movie premieres and record parties.

To amuse her demanding--and often fickle--clients, Micucci has hired fortune tellers, turned the Santa Monica Pier carousel into a set from “The Nutcracker,” and a parking lot into a pirate ship. She’s made gingerbread cookies for the movie premiere of “Toys,” beef brisket and latkes for “Used People,” and a heartland supper of roast turkey, ribs, cornbread and cobbler for “Leap of Faith.” For the West Coast premiere of “Joe vs. the Volcano,” Micucci churned out thousands of hot fudge sundaes.

“I’m not like Mary,” explains Henderson of Rococo, the oldest of the Big Four. “I don’t try to sell decorating jobs.” What does he sell? “Rococo,” Henderson says, “is food oriented.”

That food is created in a swank 48,000-square-foot “party planning center” in Van Nuys. There are separate laundry rooms, tasting rooms and pantries; the walk-in refrigerators are larger than most two-car garages. Rococo even dispatches limousines to fetch its upper-crust clients.

Rococo specializes in huge parties (this year, the company cooked up ribs for 11,000 at a Super Bowl party). For the past nine years, the company has catered the Emmy awards show. “I think we are the only ones in town to cater a Broadway opening,” says Henderson, who once worked for Leberman at Casserole. “Alan Carr wanted to make a big splash for ‘La Cage Aux Folles,’ so he sent two plane loads of our food and help to New York.”

For Ronald Reagan’s 82nd birthday party, Rococo served prime rib, braised fennel and Reagan’s favorite dessert, Chasen’s snowball (a scoop of ice cream rolled in coconut, with chocolate sauce on top). “But we did it nicely,” Henderson says. “We served it in an almond lace cookie bowl, instead of just a regular bowl.” Incidentally, Henderson says, Nancy Reagan barely ate a thing. “She’s learned the art of pushing food around on the plate and looking like she is eating.”

Ambrosia’s client list reads like a Who’s Who of Entertainment: Bruce Springsteen’s second wedding, Lisa Presley’s birthday party at Magic Mountain, an Italian dinner for Nicholas Cage and most of the Coppola clan. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Billy Crystal are regular clients.

The company also does most of the major movie premieres that Along Came Mary doesn’t. And Ambrosia, co-owner David Corwin claims, was the first caterer to start recycling. “Do you know what it’s like to get thousands of bottles back after an event?” Corwin asks. “We enhance the image of our clients by practicing socially responsible ways of entertaining. The ‘80s are over. Nobody wants to seem as if they are wasting money. It’s too embarrassing.”

Two years ago, Somerset catered the Academy Awards, but the company is known mostly for its artistic clientele. Operating out of a 6,000-square-foot kitchen under the Santa Monica Freeway, Somerset is the exclusive caterer at the Los Angeles County Museum. The 12-year-old company, owned by Hallee Gould and Michael Prud’Homme, also runs the cafe and caters parties at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. And just last week Somerset catered a party at the Getty Museum.

On a smaller scale are Joann Roth’s Someone’s in the Kitchen and Gai Klass Catering. Both firms cater star parties, but they don’t work on the mass scale of the Big Four. Klass is known for her intimate dinner parties for social types like Barbara Walters; Roth works the political party circuit (and has a Certificate of Appreciation from Mayor Bradley to show for it).

And then there are upstarts--a cluster of newer companies jockeying for position among themselves and even threatening the Big Four. When Liz and Larry got married, they turned to neither Rococo, Along Came Mary, Somerset nor Ambrosia, but to newcomer Tom Byrne of La Cuisine. When Jean-Paul Gaultier hosted a fashion show and cocktail party for 1,000 to raise money for AmFar (the AIDS research organization founded by Elizabeth Taylor), 2-year-old L.A. Caterworks handled the job. Two weeks ago, Pauline Parry and Karen Marquez of Good Gracious! outbid museum perennial Somerset on a party for 400 at the Gene Autry Museum.

“We’re not stale,” says Lili Goldstein of L.A. Caterworks. “These other caterers have been in business for years and years and years. You know what to expect from them. It gets to be the same old thing.”

In the two years since L.A. Caterworks began its assault on Los Angeles, Goldstein’s company has catered premieres for HBO, a political party for Pete Wilson, and several AmFar events. “We’re getting a lot of Along Came Mary clients,” Goldstein says, “and they are loving us.”

“So far, we haven’t been able to move in those circles,” says Pauline Parry of Good Gracious! “But we will.”

Parry and Marquez, her partner of two years, are still riding high after winning the Gene Autry Museum job. “I always feel good when we win a party over Somerset,” Parry says. “We won because our menu was better.”

“I think if you walk into a party and know instantly who did the catering,” says La Cuisine’s Tom Byrne, “something’s wrong. When all the food starts to look the same from one party to the next, there’s no individuality. We have some great hors d’ oeuvres, for instance, but we retire them pretty fast. People get bored. Why else would someone switch from one caterer to another?”

Byrne began catering in a makeshift kitchen in the basement of a Hollywood church five years ago. Soon after, he got his first break: A friend from New York recommended him to Barry Diller for a small cocktail party. Since then, Byrne has moved to new quarters, and has rapidly filled his Rolodex. Byrne catered the film premieres of “Working Girl,” Madonna’s “True or Dare,” Sean Connery’s “Medicine Man,” and Disney’s “Aladdin.” He also provided the food at a benefit for Phoenix House (the controversial drug treatment facility in Lake View Terrace).

But in 1991 he hit the jackpot: Liz Taylor asked him to cater her wedding. It happened unexpectedly while he was cooking at a party in Malibu. Taylor was one of the dinner guests. The host, who uses Byrne regularly, told Taylor that she had to have La Cuisine do her wedding. “And she hired me,” Byrne says.

Today, Byrne is still a Hollywood secret. But tomorrow, who knows? Michael Ovitz might well call. Or, he might not.

“I’ve been parking cars for 30 years,” Pick says. “And I’ve seen a lot of wonderful caterers come and go. Catering is like running a gas station. If you screw up, they’ll go to the guy on the next corner.”