Chef Ted Catering

606 Rivanna Avenue
Charlottesville, VA 22903
434.295.9283
Fax: 434.295.3806
cheftedcatering@aol.com

Thank you for contacting Chef Ted! We appreciate new clients as they are the lifeblood of our business success for the last fourteen years. Listed on this site are some of our sample menus and services. This is meant only as a guide. Please feel free to mix and match or choose recipes from the latest magazines, cookbooks or your favorite aunt, and we will be glad to make them for you. We like to explore new possibilities too!

Philosophy

In perhaps his strongest chapter, Honore takes up the art of eating. After Word War II, “food came to be marketed less for its flavor and nutritional value than for how little time it took to make”. Two centuries ago, ‘the average pig took five years to reach 130 pounds; today it hits 220 pounds after just six months and it is slaughtered before it loses its baby teeth”. We pay for this devil’s bargain with flavor. Where are the tomatoes of yesteryear? And the Edenically sweet melons and berries, the tangy sausages and hams and turkeys? Little wonder that organic stores and Whole Foods supermarkets have begun to flourish, though their offerings often fall short. No cherries have even remotely as tart and luscious a flavor as those we secretly picked as children from a neighbor’s lovingly tended tree.

But are such tastes truly gone forever? (Not With Chef Ted!) Honore travels to Bra, Italy, to attend a meeting of Slow Food, an international organization devoted to taking time in the kitchen, preserving local culinary traditions, using regional produce, bringing back endangered fruits and vegetables. The goal is to restore that lost flavor to what we eat, and thus to our lives.

The pleasures of the table, as any Mediterranean can tell you, are as serious as those of the flesh. And both are enjoyed at the tempo giusto, the appropriate speed.

A realist, Chef Ted recognizes that most of us don’t have the option of spending three hours preparing lunch or dinner except on the rarest of occasions. The Slow movement, Chef Ted, quoting Honore, concludes, “is not about turning the whole planet into a Mediterranean-holiday theme park”. “Speed can be fun, productive and powerful, and we would be poorer without it”. What the world needs therefore, and what the Chef Ted Slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age.

The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes in between. Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. At the very least, Chef Ted says, we should try to cultivate an inner slowness.

Chef Ted Catering events range from our signature "Fajita Fiesta" party in Mad Bowl for a cast of thousands, to intimate weddings on country estates, to corporate meetings at UVA's Law or Medical School.

Chef Ted's Shimmy Club is a centrally located, festive warehouse space which can accommodate up to 200 people for buffets and dance parties or receptions. Bands, DJs and Karaoke are welcome.