Catering For Two Hundred People

Two hundred is a different job, not a bigger one

Up to about eighty, catering scales smoothly, more platters, same plan. Somewhere around a hundred and fifty that stops being true, and the things that decide whether it works are no longer about food at all.

The queue is the problem

Two hundred people served from one point is a forty-minute queue, and the back of it is watching the front eat. That is the single most common way a large event goes wrong, and it has nothing to do with how good the food is.

Two things fix it. Serve from more than one point. Two stations halve it. Or serve continuously rather than all at once, which is what a hog roast does: people come over across the hour.

What we would suggest at that size

A hog roast, from £7.25 a head. It is built for numbers: carved to order, running for an hour, and the visual centre of the event. One pig comfortably covers two hundred.

A cold buffet across multiple tables. From £5.50 a head, and at this scale we would set it out as two or three identical spreads. Costs the same and cuts the queue by two-thirds.

A barbecue at £13.00 a head, cooked on site, if the space and the weather allow.

Anything cooked on site needs about 3m by 5m of flat ground with no steps to the serving area, has a fifty-guest minimum, and takes a 25% deposit with the balance due thirty days before.

The things people forget at two hundred

Bins. Two hundred people generate more waste than any domestic arrangement can absorb, and it is nobody’s job unless somebody makes it theirs.

Somewhere to sit, or a decision not to. Standing is fine for finger food and miserable for a plated meal. Decide which you are doing before you count chairs.

Access. Two hundred people’s worth of food does not go through a side door and along a corridor without adding half an hour. Tell us where the van can get to.

Dietary numbers. At this size there will be twenty or thirty people with a requirement and “a few vegetarians” is not a number we can cook to. Every buffet is 30% vegetarian as standard; vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free and halal are prepared separately and labelled, and we need counts.

Notice

More than you think, and earlier than the food. The venue and any marquee are the long lead times. For us, a delivered buffet at this size still works to the ordinary schedule, but anything cooked on site for two hundred wants months: especially a summer Saturday.

Tell us the date and the site and we will tell you honestly whether it is deliverable.