Hey, it's Francis, and if you think being a chef is a life of creativity and swashbuckling heroics, what do you hear about K-diverse? This is a super fun episode from a couple years back. Have a listen. I'm Frances Lamb, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, the show for curious cooks and eaters.

Ever since American pop culture became obsessed with food, pretty much every role in food service has had its time in the sun.

Right? You've got star chefs, star line cooks, star farmers, star bakers, star sommoliers. I mean, I knew we were really going down the list when I saw articles about rock star

butchers 10 years ago.

But there is one food profession that has never gotten the glam squad treatment.

The caterer.

And I might be biased because I got my start in food service working for a caterer.

But these really are some of the hardest, smartest, most bend-over-backwardest people in showbiz.

I mean, think about it.

It's, you know, one thing to hammer it out in a restaurant night after night, but another

to have to serve hundreds or even thousands of people at one time, in a location

you may have never seen before, maybe even without a real kitchen, and probably for an event

that is the most important day of a customer's life. So today we are all about singing the

odes to the unsung heroes of cooking. The caterers. We've got a star chef who got his start, hustling catering gigs,

the seldom talked about history of catering in the African-American community,

and somehow two tips at home from America's Test Kitchen.

But first, some stories behind the scenes, or behind the pipe and drape, as they say in the biz.

Thank you. behind the scenes, or behind the pipe and drape, as they say in the biz. The brothers Matt and Ted Lee are food writers and TV hosts and boiled peanut salesmen,

seriously. But after many years writing about chefs and many years going to catered gala

in museums and libraries, where they knew there

were no kitchens, they started to wonder, how'd that food get there? And so they went undercover

in the catering world and came out with a new book, Hot Box. Our friend Shauna Seaver talked

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