When Guacamole is the Most Ambitious Menu Item

Guacamole for a party makes an easy dish – a few ripe avocados, some chopped onion, tomato, chilies and seasoning. Serve the guacamole soon after mixing and it will be the party’s star.

But what happens when you have to feed 30,000 people — breakfast, lunch and dinner — in more than 30 corporate tents at this past weekend’s U.S. Open? Well, you have to make a lot of guacamole.

Bennett and I checked out the third round of this (what people tell me) very important golf tournament, located just outside of D.C. this year at Congressional Country Club. We were able to check out the caterer’s own corporate tent and get a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to pull off the edible win.

Ridgewells set up one huge kitchen (the size of a small restaurant) and 34 satellite kitchens around the grounds. Each tents chooses its own menu each day, ranging from deli meats to lobster mac and cheese. But when I asked the head corporate chef of Ridgewells, Robert Gadsby, what his most ambitious dish was of the whole tournament he told me it was guacamole.

“The avocados have to be perfectly ripe and it can’t be made in advance,” Gadsby listed as his reason why the crowd-pleasing dip is so difficult to pull off with crowds. Gadsby’s team pumped out 800 pounds of the creamy greenery, with his high-class addition: Maldon sea salt.

(Photo: Jill Collins Public Relations Group, Inc.)