We’re excited to bring you part 2 of our Backstage Pass series highlighting different staff members here at the IEC. With Josh Groban tonight, we thought it only fitting we bring you one of the more secretive, but one of the most important, aspects of a tour – backstage catering. We’ve even got a little insight into what it took to coordinate for Josh’s show.
The person in charge of our backstage catering is Britney Milligan. She came from the Target Center in Minneapolis and now runs the show here, meaning she coordinates meals for the tour crew, production, local crew, and sometimes the celebrities themselves.
“We start with the Rider [a list of meal, dressing room and hospitality requests from the tour given to each venue]. We go through and price it out for [the crew] and try to stay within their catering budget. Once the estimates are approved the next steps are with my chef and we do menus for the crew, typically breakfast, lunch and dinner. One of the things I have found in my experience is that tours tend to get a lot of standard foods when they go to so many different venues across the country. We try to do different types of entrée and different types of items that they normally wouldn’t have.
After determining the dinner menus and getting them approved by the show, they move onto the dressing rooms and are responsible for finding the items requested by the artist and production. The process of finding those items is usually a story in itself, especially when the requests are unique or off-the-wall, or just plain hard to find. She said she has 6-8 stores she and her servers generally use to shop for the items.
“I’ve always been able to usually find what a celebrity wants. The best way to deal with it is if I can’t find something and I’ve exhausted all my possibilities, I go back to the show and say we’re having difficulty finding this. I try and take suggestions from them as to where to get it. We just had Bon Jovi and they asked for Muscle Milk which I have never heard of before, but I guess they sell it at a lot of Walgreens. It’s very easy to find, however, they wanted the light and they wanted the vanilla. That was what was hard to find, we kept finding the chocolate or the banana. So [production] just ended up bringing 8 with her, she said ‘I have some on the bus, I’ll just bring that.
As I interviewed Britney, we literally sat down and talked for an hour straight. I don’t know why, but there is something just so darn interesting about what about what a celebrity likes to eat on tour. I think it’s because it gives you a slight glimpse into what they are actually like in real life.
“One of the things I noticed a while back is a lot of the celebrities are now eating healthier so you get a lot of requests for organic foods, foods that aren’t heavily salted, or things they want us to buy in specific stores like Whole Foods or Trader Joes . Josh Groban has steamed edamame and sliced turkey with no salt and other healthier items.
On Dane [Cook’s] first tour that I did at the Target Center, he brought his dog Spike on tour with him so we had to go to PetCo and get 3 different kinds of dog food and a food dish and water dish. So, we got stainless steel ones from PetCo and then we got stickers and put Spike’s name on the front. After the show was over I went in with my dressing room server to clean up and I looked and the two bowls were on the floor. The production guy ran in and he said ‘Oh good, you didn’t throw these away. He loves these and we totally forgot to grab ‘em.!’ And we were like ‘Yay! Justification!’
Against Me, they opened for Rage Against the Machine [the Target Center] and they asked us for a bunch of whole fruit in their dressing room. And then they asked us for more whole fruit halfway through the day, and then a few more, and we thought ‘Gosh they’re eating a lot.’ And they left all the fruit and drew different faces on all of them. The apples, the oranges, the pairs and the bananas. [They] left them for us at the end and that was really cute.
Professional Bull Riders, it’s not a performance show, it’s an athletic show. Backstage we see things like the power drinks, the energy drinks, the mass amounts of water because of what they are doing backstage – the energy bars, the healthy stuff. I walked into their dressing rooms and since these are all of the bull riders they put up the actual gates so when they are in their dressing rooms they can practice jumping onto the gate and jumping off of the gate. There were spurs and cowboy boots everywhere – that was something new for me.
Britney said one of her and her staff’s favorite part of their gig is getting creative when a new Rider for a show allows it. Some celebrities will be very, very specific about their meals and how they should be prepared, (like the Eagles who sent exact pictures, down to the size of the lemons and limes) there are some that are pretty general, and there are some in between like Josh Groban’s, whose crew sent Britney and her team general guidelines depending on the day of the week the show was.
“Chef Raul, he’s very creative. He loves doing customized menus as opposed to just the standard chicken or meat dish so when we got the Josh Groban Rider he was very excited to see what [the Rider] had suggested for the day [of the week]. We could take those items and run with it.
When I think about celebrities and crew members going through the same show night after night after night you want to do something to mix it up so they say, ‘You know, I remember Des Moines. They did something above and beyond or they did something different.”
I told you Britney was filled with stories! We’ll end this post for now, but don’t worry, we will bring you more of her stories at a later date. Our team does an amazing job catering to the celebrities that walk through out building and they always know how to make a great impression.
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