Friends remember late Palm Beach caterer Doreen Alfaro
A group of Palm Beach’s party planners, caterers, purveyors, florists and friends gathered Oct. 22 in the lush West Palm Beach gardens of Todd Maclean and Geoff Darnell’s to celebrate the life of Doreen Alfaro, owner of Christafaro’s, who died Oct. 7 after a yearlong battle with leukemia.
For more than three decades, Alfaro had been a fixture on the Palm Beach party circuit. Her menus included exquisitely prepared seasonal recipes made with the finest ingredients, artistically presented and served with unparalleled attention to detail.
She had launched her gourmet-to-go business in 1989 and catapulted it into one of the island’s premier caterers. In 1995, when an off-premise catering site became available, she began offering her clients full-service catering.
Christafaro’s big break came in 2001. The company catered a sit-down dinner for 300 at Nieman-Marcus on Worth Avenue and left the store in pristine condition so that it was ready for business the next morning. The success of that single event brought more corporate business, clients related to the arts and the Palm Beach party crowd.
She believed that first impressions were very important at any event. Christafaro’s cocktail hour began with generous libations, impeccably served with hot and cold hors d’oeuvres that conformed to her strict Palm Beach criteria (no bigger than one bite, with no dripping, no skewers), and a linen hemstitched cocktail napkin.
Throughout the summer months, she let her creative culinary talents run wild. She traveled, checked out the trends, tested new ingredients and developed recipes for the coming season.
A staff of six full-time employees spent the summer handmaking individual hors d’oeuvres that were shrink-wrapped, dated, boxed, color-coded and stored. Many caterers buy pre-made frozen appetizers, but Alfaro believed that her freshly prepared, flash frozen-offerings were far superior.
Christafaro’s had a dedicated freezer, with a back-up generator, just for hors d’oeuvres storage. Pre-pandemic, the kitchen was producing more than 100,000 individual hors d’oeuvres pre-season.
Signature one-bite goat cheese puffs and pigs in blankets were mainstays on the island’s cocktail circuit. In addition, Alfaro came up with a BLT burger, lobster rolls, Ruben strudel, mini chicken pot pies, crab cakes with herbed aioli, mac ‘n cheese cups and caviar freshly assembled and imaginatively served on edible spoons.
She was a fighter. As event cancellations for 2020 began pouring in, her mantra became “I’m not going to let a pandemic put me out of business.” That March, she tuned up her website, communicated with her customers via email and revised her business plan.
She got back in the kitchen and offered a comfort food menu for delivery or curbside pick up to her customers. In three weeks, she had made more dough for her signature chicken pot pie than she had made during the previous 10 years.
Her customers began sending notes of thanks with words like, “you saved us during COVID.”
Alfaro closed Christaforo's in June 2021.
“It was always a joy to work with Doreen on events. She was very efficient and always had a beautiful smile. I will miss her very much,” said Tom Mathieu of florist Tom Mathieu & Co.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Palm Beach caterer changed business when pandemic hit
