Amid glittering guests and watchful Secret Service men, Luc’s head chef Jason Hicks was hard at work two weekends ago, making risotto for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding celebration.

“I guess altogether we probably had about four chefs and 20 to 25 cooks,” said Mr. Hicks, a young Englishman who has worked at Luc’s Cafe on Big Shop Lane for about year.

“I was the risotto course, which was a trio of risottos,” he said.

“One plate with three indentations with an ounce of risotto in each: One was morel mushrooms and summer truffle; the other one was Meyer lemon; and the other saffron.”

Mr. Hicks worked in the New York City restaurant scene before coming to Luc’s. He got involved in the Clinton wedding through one of his former kitchen colleagues.

“The chef at the catering company was my former sous chef at La Goulue in the city,” Mr. Hicks said.

“And he’s now the chef of the catering company that did the wedding and he wanted some people like me there,” he said.

“He needed some eyes and ears and experience and so on to cover different areas.”

Chelsea Clinton married Marc Mezvinsky on Saturday, July 31, at Astor Courts, a 50-acre estate in Rhinebeck, N.Y., with a beaux arts mansion designed by Stanford White and built for John Jacob Astor IV in 1904.

The meal was planned for 550 guests, Mr. Hicks said.

“I think the final count was 527, 528,” he said. “We were working on 550.”

The crew of close to 30 chefs and cooks started days ahead and worked off-site and on-site to cater the event.

“It was being prepped the whole week, stuff that could be prepared ahead of time,” Mr. Hicks said. “Friday we did a big prep day and Saturday we started at 7 in the morning at the commissary, the kitchen. We loaded the trucks, transported the food, and got back to the commissary at 5:45 the next day — it was a pretty long day, a 23-and-a-half hour stint.

“There was a lot of staff, about 600-plus waiters, plus Secret Service and everything else,” Mr. Hicks said.

With the bride the only daughter of former President Bill Clinton and current Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, this was a wedding with a lot of precautions.

“The security was incredible,” Mr. Hicks said. “It was something to believe. You can imagine.

“We had to pass CIA checks for our ID — that was a couple of weeks before the wedding. Once we got to the venue, we had pass security to get our IDs, and we had to show our IDs,” he said.

“Then they bus you from that site, which is off the premises, they bus you in to the property. From there they check bags and so on.

“There was a lot of Secret Service there and, periodically, through the event, they did security checks — looking for bombs, or whatever.”

Mr. Hicks was born in Stratford on Avon, and brought up in Birmingham in the English midlands.

He’s been in United States about 16 years.

“Always been in the city, though, in Manhattan,” he said. “I’ve just been coming out here for the last year.”

He said Chelsea’s wedding seemed to come off fine — as far as you could tell from the kitchen, anyway — and it was a positive experience to work on the big event.

“It all went very well. There’s nothing that left a bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing,” he said.

“It was the wedding of Chelsea Clinton. But, the end of the day, my background is doing that kind of thing in a restaurant environment: For me, it’s wasn’t a ‘wow’ kind of deal,” Mr. Hicks said.

“It was fun,” he said. “It was as fun as a 23-and-a-half hour day could be.”