A family affair

"Even over fifty," he said with a chuckle, this adventure still turns me on.

Working behind the scenes for one of the areas most successful catering companies, Abigail Kirsch Culinary Productions, suits Robert Kirsch just fine.

"She (Abigail Kirsch) is our public face and image and our

As chairman of his wife's self-made empire, Kirsch finds himself involved with much of the long-term marketing and sales strategies.

"None of my role is implementation because our son, James Kirsch, who is the CEO, takes care of the day-to-day operations," said Kirsch. "Together, Jim, Abigail, Allison (Allison Awerbuch is the executive chef) and myself share the long-range growth, strategic planning, financial planning and important issues like that." After selling his uniform manufacturing business in the late 60s, and realizing "that he was too young to retire, Kirsch said his wife put him to work. At that time, her business - which started as a cooking school from the kitchen of her Westchester home - pas growing fast and she was in desperate need of help.

She cooked and I cleaned - said Kirsch, adding "until we opened a restaurant called Abigail's Hudson Place in Chappaqua. It was an instant hit in terms of interest, but a disaster in terms of marriage. She was cooking in the kitchen and I was walking around being the jolly maitre d' and giving everybody free drinks.

Just like any relationship, there were the ups and there were the downs, but whatever the Kirsch's were doing, it always seemed to be the right formula.

Today, the family-owned company operates three venues: Tappan Hill, an historic mansion nestled in Tarrytown overlooking the Hudson River, the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, and Pier Sixty & Lighthouse on Chelsea Piers in Manhattan.

The company also goes on location with their off-premise catering serving everywhere from corporate events to museum benefits to a tent on a lawn.

"There is a demand that is not being met for the formula that we have developed," said Kirsch.

And what exactly is that formula? It is something that everyone involved with Abigail Kirsch Culinary Productions likes to call "The Abigail Kirsch Experience."

"An event should be more than a catering operation, more than a party venue, it is the total event experience. It's about people, caring, confidence and outstanding catering."

Kirsch admits that the company likes to stay on top of the latest food trends, but tends to stay away from foods that can be viewed as what lie calls "precocious."

"We were serving mash potatoes at black-tie galas when nobody else was, and it took guts," said Kirsch. "But I knew it was successful when a really hoity-toity lady, who was the wife of the chairman of one of the largest Wall Street firms, licked her plate clean and left no potatoes."

Although he said that he doesn't give his opinion on food as much as he used to everybody knows that he is a meat and potatoes, peanut butter and jelly kind of a guy he would like to take some of the credit for helping to create awareness for the "comfort food," which is essentially a meat and potatoes cuisine.

"My wife has always been a component of simple honest food that you can recognize," he said. "So we are really on the same wavelength there."

So now, Kirsch is spending most of his time with the next big project which is finding the right locations to expand. He said that the company was very interested in opening locations in Long Island, New Jersey and midtown Manhattan.

"We are constantly trying to grow and we expect to be able to add a couple more locations in the not-so-distant future," he said. "Westchester is saturated and we don't need anymore places here. The areas that we would like to move to have been identified and that is what I am working on now."