Benjamin’s Catering named ‘Taste of the Town’

One-2-3 chicken doesn’t sound like something a Culinary Olympic Chef would make, but there’s more than one chef in the Benjamin family.

Benjamin’s Catering is 9 years old, the same age as Mike and Heather’s daughter, Kat. She loves to cook, especially what she calls 1-2-3 chicken, a dish that is simply panko breaded chicken.

The Benjamins light up talking about how much Kat always wants to pitch in around the home kitchen or at Taste of the Town, where Benjamin’s Catering was named first place on Sunday. She’s also their biggest fan, clearly evidenced by a video her mom showed Thursday.

“We’re in first place,” Kat, cloaked in her personalized chef’s jacket, said at Taste of the Town.

Q: How’d the business get started?

MB: My wife put this all together while I was working as a chef at Centre Hill Country Club.

HB: He was an executive chef and had a lot of support and interest in his food, and we heard about a caterer retiring in the area. We thought we should do our thing. I took some business classes, wrote a business plan, bought the equipment and just gave it a shot. It worked well, and they left a nice group of clients. We just grew on that.

Q: Why’d you take the jump?

HB: There’s a shelf life in the restaurant industry. There’s a trend where you bring a chef in, they build up your staff and teach specs. Once that’s up and running sometimes there is a tendency to move on to a newer, more affordable chef. That’s the life cycle of a chef, and there’s a lot of moving and changing. We had our first child then, so we wanted to think about our future and security.

Q: What did you think of her idea?

MB: I was scared. She took it upon herself to take business classes and research. She wanted to jump in and cater, and I was scared. This would be both our full time jobs. She was definitely right.

HB: He does what he’s told. (laughs)

Q: You’ve had a lot of experience in the food industry, right?

MB: My grandfather was a master chef, and my father was a chef. I grew up knowing that. I didn’t do too well in school, so when it time for college I knew how to cook and loved it and followed that.

HB: He did his externship at Toftrees, moved to sous chef and became their executive corporate chef. They had eight properties around the state, and he ran all of them. He didn’t have an apartment, just three hotel rooms that he stayed in around the state. It was great experience.

Q: How did you get your first customers as a caterer?

HB: We got great advice really early on, actually from Kim Morrison who does (Cakes for Occasions). She said, ‘If you’re good and doing what you’re supposed to be doing, word of mouth is all you’re ever going to need.’ We’ve done radio and other little things, but mostly each job leads to another job. We’ve also been lucky to have loyal, repeat customers.

MB: We also try to give back a lot, too. We give extra food to the Women’s Resource Center from buffets.

HB: We do them, Centre Volunteers in Medicine, gift cards to United Way, so we also try to give away some of our services. We both grew up more likely being the recipients of services. Having a business feels like we are enabled to ask, ‘What can we do?’ What are the problems facing the community? If we’re not going to make the most of it, I wouldn’t want to do it at all. So, in an effort to do that, I was in Leadership Centre Conty to learn the issues most faced by our community and to make the most of our resources.

Q: You guys also believe in zero waste, right?

MB: That’s another one of (Heather’s) ideas, because we used to do a lot of lunches for Centre County waste. They contacted us maybe six months into us starting and asked if we could do an all-compostable lunch. We weren’t even sure if that existed. Heather researched it and found they make silverware out of corn starch and said we should do it all out.

Q: You have to feed 600 people Saturday and have to be here at 1 a.m. How much behind the scenes work do you have to do to prepare for events?

MB: Planning starts Monday, and Heather works on scheduling and working them in, in waves.

HB: You also saw we start cooking a few days out. They’ll streamline that process with, say, trays of bacon as far as the eye can see. You can put them in and get them out. It’s a little different than making breakfast for the family. This has to be like a factory on that day.

Q: What are some simpler things to make and what is a little more difficult to prepare?

HB: It is a little unique for us, because everything that we make is fresh, homemade from scratch. We don’t do anything that is pre-made or a mix, so if you utilized those types of products it’d be a very different list. With fresh foods, the easier things to do in bulk are soups ... The most difficult things to do in large quantities are the more labor intensive things like hors d’oeuvres, center of the plate, fine dining, plated, which requires all kinds of extra equipment and staff than a buffet.

Q: You recently were named Taste of the Town. What does that mean to you?

MB: It’s awesome. We’ve been doing Taste of the Town since we were in business. It’s a great charity event, and we always try to bring something different to show what we can do. We want make it worth people’s while, because they’re spending some big bucks to get in there. We want to give them their money’s worth, and we realize we’re one of just 25 or so vendors. We have tried to do that every year. Our first year we brought salmon, and we were stuck doing that for a few years.

HB: It was very popular, and so he had to make it every year. The first year we didn’t make it, it was all we heard about. We assured them with what we brought, and they were gracious to allow us to move on a little bit from it. Someday we’ll bring it back.

Q: What did you make for it and how much thought went into it?

MB: About the same thought every year. It’s a big thing to us. I wanted to showcase the things I did with the Culinary Olympics team. I knew I wanted to grow around that. We knew it’d be a small plated dish, and we did a large display that cascaded down. We had a model here to see exactly how it would work out. The small plated dish was a pork loin, our own apple sausage and wrapped it around the pork loin with a fennel crust and put it on the outside. The accompaniment is we took root vegetables and made a root vegetable gratin. I made a pickled beet, pear jam and put it on a micrograin salad. That’s kind of what we did at the Culinary Olympics, completely different components, but the same techniques. I was very pleased. My daughter, she did not hold anything back. When it happened she jumped up and down screaming.

This story was originally published November 22, 2015 at 12:24 AM with the headline "Benjamin’s Catering named ‘Taste of the Town’."