They Really Cater to the Stars’ Needs

The phone rings in the back kitchen at Chris’ Cakes and Catering, springing owner Christine Van Koll into action. The caller is a production assistant on a low-budget independent film called “Domestic Disturbance.” They need a caterer, someone relatively inexpensive and reliable--it’s a 16-day shoot, in North Hollywood mostly, on a production budget of $130,000.

Van Koll knows she’d better get her menu into the fax machine posthaste; chances are, the PA has already called five or six other catering companies, all of whom are now faxing their menus, trying to underbid the next guy. Let’s say caterer A is willing to feed lunch to a crew of 30 on a low-budget movie for $10 a head. Maybe Van Koll can get the job if she comes in at $8 a head. And provides tables and chairs.

Low-budget movie shoots, music videos and the occasional student film are the bread-and-butter of Chris’ Catering, which Van Koll runs out of her bakery on Florence and 7th avenues in South-Central Los Angeles, a neighborhood still feeling residual effects from the 1992 riots.

With a regular staff of four, a set of chafing dishes and a van, Van Koll isn’t the kind of caterer who’s going to give you a lot of presentation or production value. She will, however, give you good-tasting food at a reasonable price, delivered on time.

This is no small detail when it comes to feeding the entertainment industry, where gaping stretches of downtime are the reality on sets, and a fresh, hot meal (versus a sad spread of cold cuts) can make or break a crew’s mood--and by extension the karma on the set.

“A lot of producers try to cheat on the food,” says Mark Mathis, the producer of “Domestic Disturbance.” “It’s the easiest way to [anger] the crew or the easiest way to make them happy.”

Lunch at $8 a person (tables and chairs included) landed Van Koll the “Domestic Disturbance” job, and on a recent Monday morning she and her skeleton crew were busy getting things ready for the 2 p.m. lunch call.

To walk into Chris’ Catering on such a morning is to enter a business that appears to be hurting. There are few if any customers, and the metal grating over the door clashes with the tempting bakery smells.

But go beyond the counter and into the back kitchen area and you discover a whirlwind of activity. Van Koll, a warm, modest woman in her 60s, is presiding over the food--stick-to-your-ribs stuff including fried chicken, mashed potatoes, beef tacos, linguine with marinara sauce and her much-requested spinach souffle. Four fresh strawberry pies, baked by her husband, Frank, a Netherlands-born chef, will be dessert.

It’s a lot of food, yes, Van Koll grins, but she’s certain it won’t go to waste.

“These are guys in their 30s and 40s,” she says of the “Domestic Disturbance” crew. “They eat good.”

By contrast, the disconcertingly thin Calista Flockhart favors mostly steamed vegetables and the occasional piece of fish, says Mario Gonzalez of Mario’s Catering, which feeds the cast and crew of Fox’s “Ally McBeal.” Gonzalez, whose most recent catering credits include the movies “Vampires,” “Soldier” and the forthcoming “The Life” starring Eddie Murphy, has been in the business 25 years, long enough to know that you feed stars what they want--not what you think they should be eating.

“If the main actor is sending out for food, you gotta go out and see what they want,” he says. “If you get on the wrong side of the actor, you’re gone.”

With a staff of 35 and what he terms a “restaurant on wheels,” Gonzalez can cook everything on-site, setting up, say, a taquito bar, a stir-fry station and something for the meat-eaters.

For blockbuster catering, there’s Mary Micucci of Along Came Mary Productions, considered by some event planners in town as the person to cater a big movie premiere. Her recent credits: “Titanic” (featuring sushi, of course); Jerry Springer’s “Ringmaster” (a white trash theme--trailer parks, Twinkies) and a Christmas party at Universal for 18,000 people, in which 10 acres of the back lot were transformed into a winter wonderland.

“She knows when you have a VIP section you have to have five waiters on call,” Carlotta Florio, an event planner, says of Micucci. “She has great design concepts. You know without a doubt it’ll run smoothly.”

Meanwhile, back in her kitchen, Van Koll is bent before her oven, checking on a batch of baked chicken. At a prep table, Jose Becerra, who used to work at El Cholo and the Marriott in Inglewood, is readying the tacos. Frank Van Koll is putting the finishing touches on his pies, explaining to a visitor the distinction between his homemade strawberry glaze and the knockoff industrial stuff.

Since she’s not naturally inclined to self-promotion, Van Koll’s food has to do the talking for her. Clients find her through word of mouth or through L.A. 411, a kind of Yellow Pages for below-the-line entertainment industry personnel like caterers, grips and editing houses.

When there’s a nibble, however, Van Koll can be persistent. Last year, she lobbied Emilio Ferrari for two months before Ferrari, who was producing a million-dollar independent TV movie called “Hyacinth,” hired her.

“She’s really good if you’re doing a small, independent movie,” Ferrari says. But, he quickly cautions, Van Koll will have to invest in pricier presentation to attract higher-budgeted projects.

“Most of the catering people who are doing well, they know the producers,” Ferrari says. “She can’t compete with all that stuff.”

To be sure, in an industry where caterers have to be practiced at the art of the schmooze and can produce the resumes of seasoned aesthetes, Van Koll’s is decidedly un-glitzy. Her “office” is a desk in the aforementioned back kitchen, its clutter attesting to the fact that Van Koll has no clerical support staff.

She was born in Los Angeles near Belmont High School, attended L.A. Trade Tech and after school took a job as a clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. Then one year fate intervened: She cooked for a staff Christmas party and got raves, which encouraged her to start a catering business, running it at first out of her kitchen at home.

She opened Chris’ Catering in 1981, doing neighborhood weddings and birthday parties, building her reputation and broadening her scope beyond the neighborhood. The boom in TV and movie production--where seemingly anyone with an idea and the will to raise $100,000 can become a budding Spielberg--has created a need for businesses like Van Koll’s. Nearly two decades after she started her business, Van Koll’s catering credits include a Tommy Lasorda health food infomercial and a low-budget movie starring Frank Stallone called “The Garbage Man.”

Closer to home she does work for the Urban League as well as church functions and weddings. Business, Van Koll says, has been up and down of late but certainly better than the post-riot months. Though she didn’t suffer property damage, traffic at her bakery fell off dramatically as stores closed or owners fled the neighborhood. Van Koll and her husband came close to pulling up stakes, too; after the riots, she says, no bank was about to give a loan to a woman who was trying to keep a business afloat in South-Central.

“We felt like going because everybody else left, but we mustered enough energy to stay,” she says with typical understatement.

That the Van Kolls were trying to keep their business in the neighborhood at a time many were fleeing is precisely what impressed Pat Clarke, who helped Van Koll get a loan through the Brotherhood Business Development and Capital Fund, a federally funded, low-interest loan program, an agency of the Brotherhood Crusade. The money helped get Chris’ Catering back on its feet, and now Van Koll also runs Chris’ Catering Institute, to teach kids in the neighborhood craft services and possibly connect them to industry jobs.

For Van Koll, Lesson 1 might go as follows: Forget the old saw “location, location, location.” You’re only as good as your last batch of fried chicken, your last loaf of homemade monkey bread.