Food By Design aims for the stars

Years ago, I was a partner in a catering business. It was backbreaking work. You literally packed up an entire restaurant’s worth of stuff - dishes, food, glasses, food, silverware, more food, linens, ovens (did I mention food?), and carted it to who-knows-where. Why would anybody want to do that to themselves? Isn’t life hard enough as it is? And do you know what 200 china plates sound like when they all shatter at once? (I do.)

Given my clearly lopsided view of the business of catering, these were the first questions I blurted out to Debbie Vescovi, chief cook and bottle-washer for Food By Design catering company. Her relatively new venture here in Rehoboth Beach has quickly earned a reputation for tasty creations and particularly imaginative presentation. She has progressed from whippin’ up snacks for her daughters’ sports teams all the way to weddings and luncheons for 500 people.

Debbie is no stranger to slicing and dicing. As a foster child, she cooked daily meals for five so mom could work to support them. Oh, did I mention she was only seven years old at the time? “I hated it,” she admits. “It wasn’t really the work I hated, but I made the same [expletive deleted] things all the time! Over and over. It never changed.” That is, until a friend gave her something she had never seen before: A cookbook.

With Better Homes & Gardens as her guide, young Debbie took matters into her own hands. “I started by adding peanut butter to brownies. They loved it.” (What’s not to love?) As she grew up and started dating, her cooking skills were put on hold. “My fridge contained two things: ketchup and iced tea.”

Marriage and a busy family with two kids didn’t change things all that much, but as the girls grew up, Debbie began trying out new things.

“Poor Jim was my guinea pig,” she says of her husband. “I knew I was getting somewhere when they all ganged up on me and asked if I would please make some normal food.” The Vescovi’s quickly became the house where everybody wanted to eat.

Friends suggested she open a restaurant, but with college tuitions on the horizon, she wisely chose the path with less overhead, but certainly more physical exertion. Her daughter Chloe pitched in, and is now an essential part of the operation.

Food By Design started out doing small theme parties. Word began to spread. The phone rang for holiday dinners, weddings, cocktail parties and receptions. Debbie refused to compromise: “I’d like to think my food is eclectic. I will not serve you chicken on a stick. I will not serve you bagels; you can drive up the street and buy them. You will not get those little frozen quiches from me, either.”

I’ve been fortunate to be on the receiving end of Deb, Jim and Chloe’s culinary high-wire act. They pull up in the van. Racks, coolers, tables and ovens roll out. Big orange extension cords snake in and around the staging area. Suddenly it starts to smell really good in there. Trays are decked-out with sausage-stuffed mushrooms, margarita-shot shrimp shooters, antipasto sticks (with homemade balsamic, of course), creamy mini-soups in stemmed glasses, multi-layered platters of crisp phyllo-wrapped goodies, and her fabled honey pecan cranberry chicken salad (keep drooling at www.foodbydesign.biz). Jim, I envy you. I’d love to be a guinea pig in Deb’s kitchen!

Short of the coordination required to effectively transport everything, catering is not all that different from running a restaurant. Dishes still need to be washed. Costs have to be figured and recipes refined. But all that effort pays off. Debbie is particularly proud that Food By Design was selected by NASA to cater a lunch for 500 to celebrate the successful repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. Even the astronauts who flew the mission were there.

At this point, I feel that I should be commended for resisting the temptation to write that Debbie’s food is “out of this world.” After all, the astronaut tie-in would have been way too easy. And I’m miles above that.

Bob Yesbek is a notorious foodie and can be reached at Bob@RehobothFoodie.com.