Carly Katz-Hackman: I think we maintain a really beautiful balance, and you can see it on our Instagram or on our website, of Pinch classics and new stuff. First thought is something that was developed a decade ago and will just never die because it’s eternal in its beauty and grandeur: our Pour Over bar. One, people like to see a color-changing cocktail. Two, marble and brass will just never go out of style.

I think we’ve actually brought it to Maxwell for an event before? It’s elegant and beautiful, but still playful. I think playfulness in this industry is really important - “too cool” just doesn’t resonate with me. If it’s not cool and accessible, we’re not doing our jobs!

The Pour Over is a classic example of an interactive bar that is really beautiful, and then we’ve got our self-stirred bar that is tech-forward, chrome, sexy, new, interesting. And then comes the cocktail fountain, which I personally feel proud of, and obviously take full credit for (in my dreams). People were constantly asking me for champagne towers, which I infamously can’t stand. Not because they’re lame, but because no one wants to hold a sticky glass, and no one wants flat, warm champagne; it’s just not functional! So it’s really just for the photo, and that’s no fun for guests.

So Marjo was sick of me complaining about this never-ending request to the point where she developed the cocktail fountain maybe just to shut me up. Not really but that would be funny.

There’s an endless stream of cocktail, running over dry ice to keep it cold, and guests can pop a CLEAN NON-STICKY glass underneath the “faucet” of sorts. It’s fresh, cold, NOT STICKY, while still maintaining the aesthetic that people are after. It’s about understanding these party problems, what the demand is, and then coming up with a different version of the supply to open people’s eyes that it’s not just what is, it’s what can be.

David Litwak: Very cool.

Carly Katz-Hackman: So those are some examples of our interactive cocktail experiences, but there’s so much more. We have food furniture, we have pop-ups. The pop-ups are these “wow moments” - a way of serving food that guests have never seen before.

6-8’ long trays are carried high above guests’ heads, and then lowered down when waiters get to a great spot in the room. I always say that ‘an hors d’oeuvre tray comes to you, but you really go to a pop-up.’ Hors d’oeuvre trays are kind of everywhere throughout the room, but a pop-up is going to capture the moment. They’re going to walk in and everyone’s going to be like, “What’s going on?” The trays come in one after another, and when we’ve sufficiently captured everyone’s attention, that’s when it’s time to feast.

So again, it’s kind of solving these party problems that people don’t even know they have. Like I also use pop-ups to divert a line; people might be crowding around an experience - we try and limit bar and food station lines, but unless there’s one of each per person, people will wait a few minutes, it’s okay, everyone - and I’ll send a few pop-ups through to temporarily distract. Or it might make people move over here or there when you want them to see something that’s being programmed.

It’s all about that intentionality; your guests will never even know it was manipulation. But that’s my job, with the event planner or the corporate client, to figure out what we need from and for our guests, and find a subtle and interesting way to get them there.

David Litwak: What about horror stories? I’m curious. If you’re doing as much production as you guys do for these things, well, if it were just food by itself, you’d have your standard-issue horror stories, like a line cook not showing up or something like that. But when you’ve got these complex contraptions, I imagine there are one or two stories that stand out as things gone wrong.

Carly Katz-Hackman: There’s certainly a lot of beta testing going into what we do. I remember there was a station, just like the Rube wall, where we created a wall with holes in it and trays underneath. The food item was supposed to drop through the hole into the tray, which had a sauce on it - a hot honey or something - and the item was some sort of delish fritter. But the fritters just did not want to stick the landing! It had like an 80% success rate, which means a lot of sticky fritters on the floor. Needless to say, we did not launch that for parties!

In terms of normal catering nightmares, we just have to be ready for anything. We’ve structured ourselves internally to be able to deal with any problem that arises, so that when situations arise onsite, we have the bandwidth to deal.

Onsite, weather is always a fickle beast. We have a pop-up called the Monkey Bar - like a horizontal ladder to form the rungs - and we hang cookies shaped like that barrel game, where they all link together. Once, on a massively humid day, the cookies got softer than ideal, and there were just dead monkeys everywhere on this country club floor. From there, it’s a quick pivot to a new service style.

Or the cocktail fountain outside on a windy day - the fountain was going fine, but the gust just blew the stream of cocktail straight off the fountain - or curved off the fountain is more like it - you get it. In that case, we quickly grab a screen to block the wind.

The key is to not panic. Just work the problem and have some fun.

David Litwak: A lot of mother nature intervening, it sounds like.

Carly Katz-Hackman: Oh my God, humidity. People are like, “Yay, summer, no rain,” but that humidity will kill you. You just have to laugh.

I had a call with a new potential client this morning; he was a waiter for us like 12 years ago. That’s such a huge compliment - like you were a gig-worker and loved the company enough to hire us all these years later? Makes me all warm and fuzzy. But it just goes to show how much fun we have! We really insist on a healthy office culture and a healthy on-site culture. Our staff - they’re all best friends. Or like in love. They’re bfs/gfs, bfs/bfs, gfs/gfs, all of it. We even have a newly engaged couple!

They’re also all Broadway babies, working with us between rehearsals and auditions. They’re happy to be there, they’ve got smiles on their faces. Our Pinchers!!!

David Litwak: You said you got an inquiry from a former client. Is this someone who is no longer a Broadway baby, maybe a Broadway star? Or are there some success stories of who is the most famous member of the “Pinch Mafia,” I guess is another way of asking it?

Carly Katz-Hackman: That’s a great question. We definitely have some people with extensive IMDb pages. I was watching a show on Hulu a couple of weeks ago and was like, “James!”

We had one actor who wound up in The Music Man. Another voices a character in a popular animated show. Oh, and they love the cruise ships, let me tell you, our staff loves the cruise ships.

It’s great because they’re able to go on these four-month journeys, or star in a show upstate, or head out to California to film, and then they’re always welcome to come back when they feel like it. So we’ve got a lot of retention, which is really rare in the catering world.

David Litwak: What was your favorite experience where you thought, this is why I do this?

Carly Katz-Hackman: I definitely have a lot of them - those PINCH ME moments - but the first that comes to mind is a wedding we catered in Aspen a few of years ago. It’s not typical, but we’ll travel for the right budget and client. We had done the bride’s sister’s rehearsal dinner here in New York at the New York Public Library, and they were looking for a caterer out in Colorado who could do what they needed. They couldn’t find one, so they brought us out. We literally catered an event at the base of a mountain.

I flew out, my whole staff flew out, and there were probably 50 of us staying together in this little mountain town outside the city. I remember driving to the site from the hotel, around a few switchbacks, into this valley, and boom: there was the Pinch truck set against this insane vista as the sun was setting. It was one of those moments where I thought, ‘I can’t believe this is my life.’

It was seriously so fun. I get to make people happy for a living, and I get to do it surrounded by people I absolutely love. Playing drinking games at the hotel, and even though I’m the boss… whatever.

David Litwak: Well, I was asking you, who drew the short straw, and had to drive the Pinch truck all around those curves, oh my gosh.

Carly Katz-Hackman: No, they were so excited because they got to, you know, go on this adventure rather than sitting in New York City traffic. Meanwhile, I’m going through the freaking switchbacks from Denver, and threw up the minute we pulled into Aspen proper.

David Litwak: Oh, there you go.

Carly Katz-Hackman: I remember teams were color-coded: “Okay, this is what the pink team is doing at this time, and the green team at this time. There goes yellow with the pop-ups!” Sometimes, it’s like a play, and then seeing it all just happen, it’s a really profound feeling. You’re making something happen in a small corner of the world, setting something in motion, creating a core memory for someone. It matters. It means something. I love it.

David Litwak: What you said about this family calling you out to Aspen, I think that, having now been in this industry for a little over two years, I’ve found that what passes for innovation in hospitality and design tends to be like, “Oh, we launched a bar, and it’s horseshoe-shaped.” Wow. And it’s treated like it’s revolutionary, slightly different than everything else that came before it, if not every other Western bar in this example.

I’ve thought about how few people are doing something actually innovative. We built Maxwell with these kitchens, and have you been?

Carly Katz-Hackman: Yeah, of course, I love the space.

David Litwak: We built out kitchens you can actually cook in. The funny thing is, there’s something like 20,000 different liquor licenses in New York City, that’s 20,000 competitors. Not to say that we don’t have any competition, but I do think there’s a much smaller subset of people where, if you’re looking for what we have, we stand out.

It’s one of the reasons why, having not been in hospitality at all, we’ve been able to succeed. And I think I can see something similar being true for you guys. There are a lot of catering companies, and I’m sure they all say the food is really good. I’m sure they all say a bunch of the same things, in the same way we could just say, “Hey, it’s a really beautiful space,” and it is.

And I’m sure your food’s good, as is probably the case for a lot of your compatriots. There are other beautiful spaces in New York City, I’ll be the first to tell you a list of them, and we often use them as inspiration for Maxwell. But it’s like, why use us? You have to give them a real why, not a why that everyone else has. And so I really respect that you guys have been able to differentiate yourselves.

Carly Katz-Hackman: Yeah, and I think it’s so important to recognize that. I’m the first to say, like I said to you earlier, there are a lot of talented caterers in New York City making good food with good service. If you want simple and you’re on a budget, absolutely, i encourage you to work with the less expensive option and not be stressed.

But if you want to do something different and exciting, that’s where I come in. People in New York go to a lot of parties, you know this better than anyone, having a venue. People go to a lot of events, and a lot of them are the same. At Pinch, we want to give them a different experience.

I always ask clients: what do you want your guests to tell their spouse about when they get home? Or, when they call their mom on Sunday, what do you want them to say? “I went to this event this week, and it was fine.”? NO! We want “OMG, mom I had this salad that I literally got to smash with a maraca? And a waiter came in wearing a tutu covered in eclairs??? It was wild and so cool.” That’s what we want, and that’s where I start.

David Litwak: Do you ever get this? This was an early annoyance of mine, where someone would be like, “Oh yeah…” Some 25-year-old would say, “Well, you know, the competing offer for our birthday is only 5k,” and I’m like, “Where is it?” They say, “It’s at a dive bar.”

I’m like, “That’s nice, take the dive bar.” Do you understand what you’re purchasing here? We’re not trying to meet the equivalent bar minimum of a dive bar.

It was a pet peeve of mine to get these clients who don’t really understand the value you’re adding. I imagine you’ve experienced similar things; you just said yourself, there will be someone cheaper. How often do you have to have that conversation where you’re like, “Well, maybe you’re not the right fit for us. We’re not just… this isn’t just where you’re gonna pound down some tacos for dinner. We’re creating an experience.”

Carly Katz-Hackman: 100%. I think that with new clients, and we’re so lucky that we do about 350 events a year, just for some context, so many of them are repeat events or repeat clients that we’re working with a dozen times in a year. But we do have a lot of new clients, and I probably have that conversation about 25% of the time.

We’re lucky to have clients that are a little savvier, whether it be a professional planner they’ve hired or someone for whom budget isn’t as much of a concern. Most of our new clients come in through referrals, which is great. But for those new clients that are like, “Oh, well, I got this other proposal for half,” I’m like, “That’s incredible. I hope it’s a really great event and I want it to be amazing. I’ll call you the following week and see how it went.”

At the end of the day, I don’t want to be stressed about budget, and I don’t want a client to be stressed about budget. So if that’s going to be a prevailing concern, I like to nip it pretty early on because I don’t want to be fighting during this process. I don’t want nickel-and-diming. I don’t want anyone to feel like they’re being ripped off.

I’m also the first to say to a client, “I’m here to sell you the sun, moon, and stars, but I don’t think you need that extra dessert. Don’t spend your money on it - get another floral for the bar or whatever.” I don’t want to take any more of your budget than I think is going to make an impact.

It’s about having that integrity and being a partner in their planning process - someone they can count on to tell them like it is, whether they need to spend more or spend less. So yeah, it’s nuanced, what we do for sure, but it’s fun.

David Litwak: I think it's a good place to end it, and I really appreciate your time, Carly. Thank you so much. Cheers.

Carly Katz-Hackman :Thanks, David. Bye!!