What to ask a caterer before you book them

Catering goes wrong in predictable ways, and almost none of them are dramatic. The food is fine but arrives lukewarm. The vegetarian guests get an afterthought. The quote quietly did not include staff, or travel, or the things the food sits in. None of that is bad luck. All of it is decided in the conversation before anyone cooks.

Here is what is genuinely worth asking, including the questions that are slightly awkward.

Where does the food actually come from?

Ask whether the kitchen cooks it or buys it in. Plenty of catering is assembled rather than cooked, and there is a real difference in how it tastes by the time it reaches a table.

At The Butcher's Pantry the answer is unusually direct, because the meat comes off the same whole animal butchery that supplies the retail case. A catered plate is cut from the same sourcing as anything you would buy at the counter: local farms, raised without antibiotics, grass and grain fed.

Can I see a menu built for my event, not a package?

A fixed package is convenient for the caterer and rarely right for you. A graduation lunch in June and a winter fundraiser do not want the same food, and a menu that works for both is usually a menu optimised for neither.

Ask to build it around your event type, your guest count and your dietary restrictions. If the answer is that there are three tiers to choose from, you have learned something useful.

What happens to the dietary restrictions?

This is the question that most reliably separates a good caterer from an adequate one. Ask specifically what the vegetarian, gluten free or allergy guests will be eating, by name, not in principle.

Bring it up early. It is straightforward to build a menu around a restriction and awkward to retrofit one two weeks out, which is when most people mention it.

What is genuinely included in this number?

• Staff, and how many, and for how long.
• Travel and setup, and whether that is inside the quote or beside it.
• Serving equipment, chafers, platters, linens.
• What happens to leftovers, and who takes them away.
• What the deposit is and when the final head count has to be confirmed.

Have you done my size before?

Eighty covers is not eight covers with more pans. It is a different logistical problem, and the honest answer to whether a kitchen has done it is worth more than a portfolio.

This kitchen caters weddings, corporate luncheons, birthday parties, graduations, holiday parties and fundraisers, at whatever size the room is. One corporate client described it as professional, punctual and delicious, which covers the three things that actually go wrong.

Who will I be speaking to on the day?

Ask whether the person quoting you is the person who will be there. In a small kitchen the answer is usually yes, and that is one of the real advantages of booking a small kitchen.

What to have ready when you call

You do not need all of this to start a conversation, but having it to hand turns one phone call into a quote instead of three phone calls into a maybe: the date and whether it is flexible, a rough guest count, the event type, and any dietary restrictions you already know about.

Call 440 999 0990 or send the details through the contact page. Fridays and Saturdays book earliest, so a date you are sure of is worth raising sooner than feels necessary.

The timing question nobody asks

Ask what time the food will be ready relative to what time you told your guests. Those two numbers being slightly different is the single most common cause of catering that was cooked well and eaten badly.

It matters most at weddings, where the schedule slips by an hour as a matter of routine and the food has to survive the gap. A caterer who has worked a lot of weddings will already have an answer about how they hold food and for how long. One who has not will tell you it will be ready at four.

Why a working kitchen is worth looking for

There is a practical reason to prefer a caterer who also runs a restaurant or a shop the rest of the week. A kitchen that cooks every day has its sourcing, its staff and its routines already running, rather than assembling them per booking.

Here that kitchen is the same one that cooks the restaurant menu and cuts the retail case. The sausage in a catered breakfast is the sausage in the case, made in house. It is a smaller claim than most catering marketing makes, and it is checkable, which is rather the point: you can walk into the shop on a Tuesday and look at the food you are being quoted for.