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Sunday, December 08, 2002

By Cristina Rouvalis, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

You might think Bob Sendall's life is as sweet as his baked apple with saffron vanilla bean syrup. One moment, he is jetting off with Henry and Elsie Hillman to cook at their Canadian lake estate. The next, he's whipping up turkey pot pie for Teresa Heinz and associates. Then he's talking about the time he splashed Sharon Stone's sheets with lavender oil.

	Colleen White, left, and Debbie Mortillaro help Sendall prepare the food for an autumn party in Sewickley Heights. (Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette)

"It's a very glamorous life, darling," he says, tilting his head to the right with a theatrical flourish.

But it's not all glamour. At least not at 7:15 p.m. on a recent evening, as a Squirrel Hill dinner party for 60 stirs to life.

The unthinkable has happened.

Sendall's souffles, a signature dish that always, always comes out perfect, are black on top. The thermometer on the oven he rented isn't working.

Sendall's party smile droops into a frown.

But he steels himself, jabbing a knife inside a porcini mushroom souffle, which is mercifully not burnt inside. "They will still taste yummy," he says from the basement of the house.

Five minutes later, he bounds jauntily up the steps, smiling at guests as he holds a tray of singed souffles high above their heads.

Inside the kitchen, he lops off the imperfect tops like an executioner chopping off heads and spoons the perfectly cooked insides onto salads.

After dinner, guests at the United Jewish Federation party gush to their pal Bob about his food, especially the mushroom souffle.

Sendall salvages a souffle, and once again, pulls off a picture-perfect party.

"I'm a complete nut case," Sendall, 45, says in one of the rare moments when he is sitting and not talking on his cell phone. "I fuss and I fuss and I fuss. Everything I do is a production."

Hence the name of his new North Side business, All in Good Taste Productions, his second foray into high-end party planning in Pittsburgh.

Sendall hates being called a caterer. It grates on him like imitation vanilla and surf and turf ("Why mix meat and fish?"). His business card says "event producer," a title that hints at the tony affairs he orchestrates for clients who think nothing of plunking down $100 to $150 per person and up for a dinner party (alcohol not included).

For that price, you get Sendall-style pampering -- great food, the kind of presentation you see in magazine photos, artful centerpieces plucked from nature, beautiful linens and flowers. Usually there's an unexpected touch, such as an outdoor sofa made out of hay or a wedding cake with fireworks.

"Truthfully, what I charge to do this is very, very, very reasonable," he says. "You couldn't get anyone in any other city to do this at this price."

Elsie Hillman says she hires him "because he just happens to be the best. He teaches me how to cook and feeds us handsomely."

Sendall is also the genie behind public parties such as the recent Westmoreland Museum of American Art's gala auction, where the 60 guests applauded when they were served individual pumpkin souffles inside baby pumpkins.

He also did the Mattress Factory's $250-a-plate 25th anniversary dinner in June. In anticipation of the featured exhibition by environmental artist James Turrell, Sendall went to Arizona to visit Turrell at Roden Crater, which the artist is excavating to observe the effects of natural light.

Sendall's touch: centerpieces of lava rock mined from Roden at each table.

"He's bigger-and-better Bob. ... He cooks, but he is not a cook," says Barbara Luderowski, executive/artistic director of the Mattress Factory. "He is an entrepreneur. He's an artist" who captures "the magic of the moment."

Sendall is known as much for his parties as for the clients he throws them for.

"He has the cachet of being the spatula to the stars," says Thomas Sokolowski, director of The Andy Warhol Museum.

Sendall works with manic zeal, often putting in 18-hour days, especially now during the holidays. He might down a toasted cheese sandwich or yogurt while talking on the phone about menus of autumn wild mushroom soup and osso buco made with Elysian Fields lamb.

He flies back and forth between his homes in Pittsburgh and Palm Springs, Calif., working at a breakneck pace so that clients on both coasts can relax at parties where ladies are served first and napkins are draped over the seat back of a guest who leaves the table.

"I'm bicoastal, not bisexual," he says laughing.

Actually, Sendall is openly gay, and he thinks the fact that he is in touch with his feminine side is one reason he gets along so famously with his female clients.

"We love the same things -- beautiful flowers, gorgeous linens."

If they ask, he'll even throw in free wardrobe advice. "What should I wear?" Melanie Werner of Hermitage asked Sendall when he threw a party for her and her husband, Eric, in their home in Paris in September. "Let me see your jewelry," Sendall told her. He chose a diamond and onyx necklace before selecting a fitted camel cashmere dress from her closet.

Scott Chilcott, a member of his waitstaff, remembers the time Sendall persuaded a hostess who came down in sweater and slacks to go back upstairs and change into a gown. "He's like their best friend.

"He is all about romance and flattery and absolute perfection."

Jack E. Kime, chief financial officer of the Heinz Endowment, gives Bob Sendall his business card, asking for Sendall's advice on designing an environmentally friendly kitchen. (Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette)

Kitchen karma

Sendall is having the party to beat all parties -- a 350-person blowout in October to christen his renovated $75,000 commercial kitchen across the street from his rowhouse on Monterey Street in the Mexican War Streets.

Young women in tight black pants, middle-aged women in well-cut suits, men in hip sports jackets mill between the rowhouse that contains his sparkling new kitchen and his house, with its purple living room and a band playing in the lush garden. The aroma of tellagio cheese on thin-crusted pizzas wafts through the air.

Mayor Murphy stops by. So does Elsie.

But Sendall is the star, the chef and host all in one. "Live Well," shout the blue and red squiggles on a shirt with one arm veering off to zebra stripes. His merry blue eyes, framed by long light eyelashes, shine as he flits through hundreds of five-second conversations, looking every last person in the eye.

"Hi, honey. Oh, heyy looooove. Oh, you brought your son. Oh, you brought all the men in your life," he says, hugging one woman and letting out a laugh that crescendos. "Oh, you are going to visit us in Palm Springs."

"I can't believe so many people were coming to see a kitchen," says his mother, Jean Sendall Rammon, who flew in from Phoenix.

It's not just the kitchen, though. The October party signifies his return to Pittsburgh party planning in a big way.

Five years ago, Sendall was spread too thin and couldn't go to all the parties he booked. So he sold the business to his partner. He opened up a bed-and-breakfast in a house once owned by Betty Grable in the California desert. People figured he had bolted from Pittsburgh, but in fact, for three years he stayed on as a consultant for All in Good Taste, getting new clients for the business and living nearly half the time in his Monterey Street home. So when his partner closed the company a year ago, Sendall opened a new business here by adding "productions" to the name.

Sendall is cooking more this time and goes to every party he books. He also teaches cooking classes with Jane Citron, a Squirrel Hill food writer and teacher. And now he's built his dream kitchen, with a granite island and stainless-steel walls and a mirrored wall near the entrance, so he can see who comes in while he's cooking. "It's feng shui," he says, referring to the ancient Chinese art of arranging the environment to maximize positive energy.

Opening a hip urban kitchen is the crowning moment in a cooking career that began more than 30 years ago in a cramped avocado kitchen in suburbia.

Sendall was born and raised in Scott. Food was in his blood. His mother and grandmother were always cooking and entertaining, and his cousin Henry Prantl owned Prantl's Bakery in Shadyside.

The first time Sendall turned a profit as a chef was in sixth grade, when he sold Christmas cookies for $1 a dozen. "I cleaned up the mess, and he got the money," quips his mother. The next year, his mom persuaded Community College of Allegheny County to let the seventh-grader into a cake-decorating class.

But making perfect icing roses didn't make him popular with other little boys. "I was teased constantly. I was a quiet kid."

At age 20, he was accepted as an apprentice at The Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., where he learned the techniques of classical cooking.

He later landed the job as chef at the Mozart Room at Heinz Hall, where Henry J. Heinz II and Drue Heinz would often stop to eat.

In 1982, the Heinz family invited him to cook for them in their winter home in Florida. It was a big break, but initially he was a wreck, knowing the demanding reputation of the British-born Drue Heinz.

"I always say working for Mrs. Heinz was like going to Harvard," says Sendall, who went on to cook for the couple in their Manhattan and London homes. "She had a very sweet side to her. There was the other side to her -- how to set the table perfectly, how to season something. Perfectionist doesn't begin to describe her. She wanted oxtail stew. I had to make it six times [before getting it just right] for a dinner for Henry Kissinger. She forced me to be good."

In 1983, Sendall opened his own business, All in Good Taste. He knew how to make a creme brulee and souffle, but he was your stereotypical temperamental chef.

"I was a tyrant," he says. "I never forget one time throwing a food item across the kitchen."

A business consultant and therapy helped him tame his prima donna chef's personality.

Now, he eases the tension in the kitchen by constant banter with 10 part-time staffers, who are loyal and get a base pay of $125 a night. "She's my right arm," he says of Debbie Mortillaro, a perfectionist in the kitchen who's assisted Sendall for about 20 years. His staff has helped him put on private parties for Teresa Heinz, the Hillmans, millionaire commodities broker Bruce Kovner and a romantic dinner for actress Sharon Stone, when she was visiting town in 1995 making the movie "Diabolique."

"She never flinched at the cost" -- $3,500 for a romantic dinner for two, he says. Sendall wouldn't say who the lucky guy was, except that he was an entrepreneur.

That steep price included new bed linens tossed in lavender oil, 50 candles in the back yard and cashmere throws outside, and a six-course dinner with each course served in a different place in the house, the last one in front of the living room fireplace. (As a thank-you, she flew him out to California to make her Thanksgiving dinner.)

In Pittsburgh, some merchants, people on the set and reporters called Stone aloof or worse. But Sendall gushed, "She was adorable."

	Bob Sendall, center, consults with his colleagues, Colleen White, left, and Debbie Mortillaro as they prepare a tented dining room for a Sewickley Heights party. (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette)

Life of the party

It is 12:30 p.m., six hours before the first guest arrives for a "bonfire/bistro" in Sewickley Heights in mid-October.

"Happy party day," Sendall says as he enters the sprawling house, hugging the hostess, Leslie DeSimone, a statuesque blonde whose wedding he planned.

She is the dream client who leaves Sendall to do his thing, including moving the sofa and Oriental rug out of her living room.

Sendall, who has been up since 7 a.m., skitters from room to room like a dervish of good taste. He and his staff check the lighting in the heated tent covering the back patio, whip up a dramatic centerpiece out of maple and Burning Bush leaves they picked from the yard, rearrange the wood for the bonfire outside, and start baking thin-crusted pizzas and Asian vegetable rolls for appetizers.

"His food is the best, and you get Bob too," says Mark DeSimone, Leslie's husband, as he watches him do decorating and cooking laps.

Then Sendall throws together an outdoor sofa made of hay, covering it with linen tablecloths and adorning it with elegant throw pillows. It's the perch from which to watch the bonfire.

The first guest, a young woman with flashing brown eyes and a suede fringe skirt and black boots, comes at 7:15 p.m., and the last one stays until almost 3:30 a.m.

At 2 a.m., after the crowd has feasted on osso buco and grilled herb quail and has imbibed and danced, Sendall goes outside to join people sitting by the blazing bonfire. He takes Leslie DeSimone by the hand.

"Oh, this is unbelievable," she tells him.

Sendall, who has been on his feet for 19 straight hours, sits on the hay couch next to the hostess, beams at the party and exhales before heading home.