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How Catering Works
[This is one part of a series on How Catering Works. If you are arriving on this page from a search engine or a link, please click here to see the introduction to the series.]
Typical Catering Equipment
Rotating Your Menus
The market dictates menu needs and desires. Everyday, someone comes up with a unique item and a way to present it. Most food service managers and chefs will then take that unique item and do something to make it taste even better, and then they enhance its presentation. In short, we're constantly improving upon each other's ideas. Take the "egg" for example. It started out hard-boiled, moved up to an omelet, then became Hollandaise sauce, and now it's a soufflé!
While people rarely approach caterers with special dietary requests like a vegetarian or low-sodium meal, most chefs or caterers will accommodate special needs. The general rule is that if it's in the building and you want it, you'll get it. The price is then adjusted accordingly, and the magnitude of that adjustment depends on the magnitude of the request.
Sample Menus
I use several different types of menus, including:
Go to the next article or pick from the table of contents:
by Chef Mike Flowers
If you're going to be preparing food for 100 guests, you're going to need a lot of surface space and a good bit of equipment. For example, my kitchen is 1200 sq. ft. and includes the three warming cabinets, four convection ovens, one 10-eye stove, two 70 lb. oil capacity deep fryers, one reach-in refrigerator, one walk-in cooler, five upright freezers, two floor model mixers (one 30 quart and one 60 quart), one 12 inch slicer, one dry goods storage room, and plenty of counter space. You could get by with less equipment and space, but you will have to be careful with the items you pick for the menu and be willing to work in stages.
It's standard in the food service industry for quality food service establishments to change their menus every quarter. At Eastside, we follow this practice for all three of our food service departments, school lunch, Wednesday night supper, and special events. The rule of thumb is to track your Product Mix -- less popular items are replaced with new items every three months. Product Mix is simply a method of tracking which items are popular and which aren't. For example, if your menu consists of items A-Z (Chicken Marsala, House of Murphy, Lobster Thermidor, Porterhouse Steak, Veal Picatta, etc.) and -- at the end of three months -- you've sold 1082 Marsalas, 28 House of Murphy, 486 Lobster Thermidors, 602 Porterhouse Steaks, and 497 Veal Picattas, then you know to remove House of Murphy from your menu for the next quarter -- if not permanently -- and offer another type of ground beef entree in its place.
Source: These are some sample menus from an upcoming book I'm working on with author Donna Bankhead. Catering Your Own Wedding will be released in August 2000.
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