The Men of Spilled Milk Catering give WL the dish.
By Lindsay Rice
Spilled Milk Catering's brilliant food connoisseurs Amit Gulati and Raj Bhattacharya. Photo by www.staceyviera.com.
Spilled Milk Catering shares its passion for food and entertainment with the DC area. Spilled Milk Catering dedicates itself to serving delicious, unique, real cooking. Food lovers Amit Gulati, Raj Bhattacharya and James Shea joined forces to create food you can taste and appreciate. Combining previous restaurant and chef experience, business acumen, and an obsession for fine cooking, Spilled Milk Catering is nothing short of amazing. The gentlemen sit down with WL and give us the dish on their passion for food.
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How would you describe your cuisine?
In a word: accessible. We love coming up with creative ways of bringing ingredients together and new techniques for presentation, but at the same time, we try to keep everything lighthearted and fun. Our down-to-earth approach is one of the qualities our customers have come to love. Sure, our dishes do have a modern sophistication but our main goal is to provide a quality product that everyone will enjoy. Food is one of the few honest expressions of creativity that brings people together. That’s what led to the creation of our company, and we like to think that we bring that essence to every event we cater.
What has been a popular/client favorite dish, or any specialty items?
Our best dishes combine our creativity with our love for traditional ingredients. One of our most popular items is our Indian Spiced Lamb Lollipops with a Mint Yogurt Sauce. We take juicy pieces of lamb cut to just the right size for an appetizer and season them with traditional Indian spices mixed with Southern BBQ spices to give them some kick and an awesome flavor. The Mint Yogurt Sauce adds a cooling flavor to balance out the heat from the lamb. Another one of our hits has been our Spicy Ahi Tuna served in Wonton Ice Cream Cones. The best part of this dish is the blend of textures—the crispy wonton cone pairs perfectly with the spicy tuna. And it tastes great, too!
I read that you like to integrate both professionalism and fun into your catering, how do you create that atmosphere at the events?
The atmosphere we bring to our events really just comes from the fact that we love catering. At the core of this company is our passion for food; we simply enjoy creating dishes that get people talking. Getting those “oohs” and “aahs” when we serve our dishes or hearing that a guest enjoyed our food are the moments we live for. And since we have so much fun working our events, we can’t help but show it (if there’s a DJ at the party, don’t be surprised to find us dancing in the kitchen).
You use fresh and local ingredients whenever you can, describe why this is important to you/does this mean that you recommend certain dishes at a certain time of the year?
Being a local business ourselves, we think it’s important to support other businesses in our community, which is why we use local ingredients for our events whenever possible. At a client’s request, we can even design a menu that focuses on organic ingredients.
Local ingredients mean fresher ingredients. And fresh ingredients are a must because they lead to a better tasting dish in the end. This gives us a chance to update our menu with seasonal dishes throughout the year. A lot of our favorites can be enjoyed year round, but we love creating bright, refreshing dishes for our summertime parties and warm, comforting plates for our events in the colder months. But of course, we design our menus based on whatever the client wants! As we continue to grow as a company our reach into the local produce this area has to offer will only grow.
How did you come up with the name for your catering company?
Unsurprisingly, we get this question at just about every event. We originally didn’t have an official answer to this, so whenever we were asked, a new story would be told on the fly. So many variations of the story have been told that the origins of the company name are now shrouded in mystery. The most popular theories range from a cooking accident to a typing error in our corporate filing papers. Let’s just say the truth is somewhere in the middle. When we started this company, all we wanted to do was cook and the details were secondary. All that can be said is that one day in 2009; three weary figures emerged from a kitchen forever bound together by the name “Spilled Milk Catering.” Or something like that.
