Three-ring kitchen
Michael Vaughn feeds Ringling Bros.’ acrobats, elephant trainers and contortionists
PROFILE. Any chef worth his salt can throw together dinner for 200 on fairly short notice, even accounting for vegetarians, carbophobics and the occasional cilantro shortage. Ringling Bros.’ Chef Michael Vaughn does all this three times a day on a moving train, and he usually orders his supplies for Colorado while he’s in Connecticut. Meet the guy who keeps the bendy folks, the clown car and the Teamsters happy.
A former firefighter and Louisiana native, Vaughn got into cooking for the circus — which is rolling through the Northeast this month — by accident. “I had a friend who ran a temporary agency, and she said, ‘The circus is coming to town.’ I thought it was a joke. I had no idea they had a real food service.”
They do, and for good reason. The 225 people who roam the United States with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey for months on end need to eat, and hailing from 16 countries, they like to eat a lot of different things. Vaughn and a staff of six run the Pie Car, the dining car on the circus’ touring train, as well as a 22-foot trailer that parks outside the venue and is called the Pie Car Junior. While they’re traveling, the Pie Car is open 24 hours a day. It serves around 200 pounds of food daily for everyone from tiny aerial acrobats to the burly crewmembers who set up and break down the show’s tents in each city.
But Vaughn isn’t just focused on volume. He tries to bring a little bit of home to the various performers by giving them a chance to cook some familiar comfort food if they like. In addition, Vaughn’s menu plans must accommodate a range of cultures and tastes. “We have a lot of Moroccans who can’t eat pork, and the working crew are meat and potato guys. They’re not into the no-carb thing or salads.”
If that weren’t enough, there’s the added challenge of cooking on a moving train. “You have to have what we call train legs. If you stand too rigid, you will fall over,” Vaughn says with a laugh. “And you learn quickly what you’re limited to when the train’s moving. You can’t use the fryer, and I wouldn’t recommend cooking pasta. You learn how to improvise.”
Vaughn says he wouldn’t trade the crowded quarters, long hours or difficulty in getting repairs and deliveries (try getting groceries sent to the train yard) for his old, lucrative job as a chef on an off-shore oil-drilling platform, in part because the behind-the-scenes drama is just so damn juicy. “The Pie Car is the meeting point; we call it drama central. This is a real soap opera, and we see 90 percent of it. It should be a reality show.”