| Catering to the Stars
by Malcolm Jolley
Chef Tony Loschiavo
Tony Loschiavo’s 25 year old L-Eat catering company (www.leatcatering.com) is the official caterer for the Toronto International Film Festival Group, which means he sets the menu for the stars at the big parties. Loschiavo began planning for the TIFFG’s parties a year ago, but only a few days before the launch of the festival, he’s not 100% sure about what will unfold. “It always happens,” the industry veteran explains, “they’ll ask us to do a last minute party for Brad Pitt or someone like that.”
Putting a party together on a few hours notice is tough enough for amateurs, but the 10 day festival takes every rental chair, glass and party favour in Toronto. How can he do it? Loschiavo’s coy, simply stating he has “ways to get things” over a period of time where there are “shortages of everything except alcohol.” After all this is a man who routinely plans private parties for Toronto’s moneyed-set that can cost up to $1,000 or even $1,500 a head.
Loschiavo seems cool and collected enough, speaking in his restaurant Paese in north part of Toronto. If anything, he’s looks pretty excited. “Look,” he says, “it’s about catering. That’s the word: catering to people’s wishes. That’s what we do and we love it.” Maybe this is his secret: many restaurants cater to supplement the revenue from their regular operations. Loschiavo did the opposite: he opened his restaurant as an after thought to L-Eat, housing them both in the building he owns.
Catering to the stars means balancing the menu carefully and balancing between the need to feed and the requirements of a good party. For one thing, there’s no plate service so everything needs to be easily eaten standing up. And then there are the weird diet requirements of the Hollywood set. Some stars, will of course, demand specific foods, but Loschiavo says there is a basic set of “healthy” strictures he tries to stick by: low or no-carb, no butter, no red meat, etc. He says he must always have a vegan option too.
One of the more interesting new celebrity diet requests, Loschiavo tells me, is an insistence on local food. Aha! I am all of a sudden buoyed (if not slightly disturbed) by the idea of Brad and Angelina becoming Slow Food advocates. Would there be convivia at the Playboy Mansion? But no: that’s not it at all. The Hollywooders are after wrinkle busting anti-oxidants and hope the beauty secrets locked into their raw foods will be more powerful if locally sourced. True enough, I guess.
It’s only when Loschiavo begins to describe some of his menu items, that I sense something else going on. He tells me he’ll be serving foie gras, steak frites, popcorn shrimp, a Stilton bison burger and a version of fish’n’chips (albeit a black in miso one). This doesn’t sound like it’s particularly in “The Zone”. Loschiavo laughs, rolls his eyes and explains, “They all cheat! The trick is to give them something that’s worth cheating for!”
Maybe the stars aren’t that different from you and me after all. ____________________ |
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