Catering Handbook / Edition 1 available in Hardcover
- ISBN-10:
- 0471284270
- ISBN-13:
- 9780471284277
- Pub. Date:
- 01/16/1991
- Publisher:
- Wiley
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780471284277 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wiley |
| Publication date: | 01/16/1991 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.32(w) x 9.27(h) x 1.02(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The catering industry's basic purpose is to supply what is needed for the planning and execution of functions on given dates and at specific locations, where food is of prime importance. The catering industry also prepares the foods that are brought to places of work, to homes, and to self-service parties.
The increased demand for catering services outside the home is brought about by the general high level of business, the large number of working families, and the limited facilities in small houses and apartments. Since few households are equipped to serve many more than the immediate family, large-scale entertaining must be done outside the home, either in restaurants, banquet halls, or public meeting rooms.
Even if space and facilities permit entertaining at home, outside professional help is usually needed, since live-in domestic help is a thing of the past. The host and hostess who wish to have good food graciously served and still be able to spend time with their guests will call on the professional caterer.
Many public meeting halls that have well-equipped kitchen but no permanent or regular kitchen staff are designed with the caterer in mind. Persons renting the facilities of the club may use any caterer approved by the club management.
Industrial plants and various other institutional operations that are not large enough to support any permanent restaurant or snack bar will need the services of the professional mobile unit caterer.
Good food is a major consideration at fund-raising affairs. Other community activities, such as fairs, local flower shows, and art exhibits, are also occasions where professional help in required in planning for the refreshments to be served.
Whether the need is to serve a small formal dinner in a private home, or refreshments at a political rally for hundreds, or to prepare box lunches for 75 youngsters for the 60 days of summer camp- The call goes out to the professional caterer, who offers a uniformed trained staff to serve practically any need.
Any caterer should be able to supply the food and services needed for the following occasions:
BreakfastDinner
Brunch
After-theatre buffet
Morning coffee break
Midnight supper
Lunch
Birthday party (for all ages)
Pregame snack
Anniversary
Picnic or barbecue
Office party
Tea
Open house
Shower
Cocktail reception
Wedding
This is only a partial list. Each of the general classifications may be expanded almost indefinitely. Breakfast, for example, can mean anything from a company executive breakfast at 9:00 a.m. with 25 attending, to a wedding breakfast at 11:30 a.m. held at a banquet hall with 250 guests.
The caterer may be defined as one who provides a supply of food with the equipment and staff required to serve the food. The menu, number of guests, time and type of service desired, and location are decided upon in advance by the host. In a banquet hall, the price includes rental of the room. If off premises, there may be an additional charge for service. Regardless of the number of guests, this is a private affair not open to the general public. The host pays for the entire affair.
For our purposes, catering services fall into three major categories, defined as follows.
1. Banquet Hall: The caterer has a banquet hall and possibly several other public rooms with a kitchen and commissary attached. He can offer complete service and staff. Banquet hall and rooms are open only when an affair is in progress. The customer comes to the banquet hail caterer.
2. Off Premises or Location: The caterer has a kitchen or commissary but no banquet hall, rooms, or facilities for serving. He may cater in private homes, public meeting halls, churches, or temples or do straight delivery of prepared foods. The caterer goes to the customer.
3. Mobile Unit: A mobile unit is a specially designed panel truck for route service specializing in snack-type foods and fast service. Food for the mobile unit is prepared in a central kitchen or commissary, then placed in the trucks for sale at various stops. No cooking is done in the mobile unit. The caterer goes to the customer at place of work or play.
The banquet hall and off-premise caterer should be flexible enough to work in any one of many places, including
- 1. his own kitchen and banquet hail,
2. his kitchen but with service off premises,
3. club or meeting-room facilities,
4. business offices and civic centers,
5. beaches and picnic grounds.
Other terms with which every caterer should be familiar are the following.
1. Restaurant: Defined as a public eating house, it is situated at one location, is open stated hours, and has a variety of items on the menu. Specialty restaurants may have very few items on the menu; however, a choice is always given. The patron makes his choice and pays accordingly. Generally no reservations are necessary. The patron may enter the restaurant any time during its open hours and expect to be served. Many restaurants now offer private rooms for private catered parties. The customer comes to the restaurant.
2. In plant: Usually a permanent facility located in an industrial plant or school, it operates exactly as a small restaurant with the exception that it is open only to employees or students where it is located. It has stated hours and may be subsidized by the management. The customer goes to the facility. Many in plant feeding facilities are "let" on competitive basis with all types of interested caterers bidding.
The large hotel with a ballroom and kitchen facilities is the oldest of the public catering services as they are known today. The banquet hall offers the same catering facilities but is not in the hotel business. Since the actual catering services offered by the independent banquet hall and the hotel banquet hall or ballroom are almost identical, they shall both be considered as banquet hall catering here.
The banquet hail is a very large room with a stage or raised platform at one end. In addition to this stage, the banquet hall should have
- 1. tables and chairs to seat the maximum number of guests permitted in the room;
2. dishes, flatware, and glasses to serve all guests;
3. linen (see To Buy or Rent in Sec. 23C)
4. chafing dishes and buffet service items;
5. public address system;
6. facilities for showing films and slides for business meetings;
7. easy access to street or lobby and parking lot;
8. large well-lighted dressing rooms for brides, fashion shows, etc.;
9. coat check rooms;
10. easy access to storerooms for tables, chairs, and platforms;
11. direct connection to the kitchen;
12. kitchen equipped to feed maximum number of guests;
13. adequate lighting and spotlight arrangements;
14. electrician and carpenter on call.
In addition to the large ballroom, the banquet hall caterer should have smaller rooms available for smaller or more informal groups. These rooms might be decorated in any of the following ways.
1. Round Table or King Arthur Room: Decorated in dark wood colors with shields and copies of ancient armor, the Round Table or King Arthur's room is ideal for businessmen's lunches, meetings, and conferences. The room might feature one very large round table and several smaller ones as needed. A popular sales feature is to limit this room to men only for lunch, although it might be opened to couples for the dinner hour.
2. Flower Room: The Flower Room's decor is of light floral decoration, where the flowers are changed with the season. It is most attractive for women's groups for bridal showers, luncheons, card parties, etc.
3. Local Hero Room: The Local Hero Room is decorated with old newspaper clippings attractively framed, trophies and awards, or copies of awards won by any local hero.
4. Foreign Rooms: The appeal of faraway places is very strong. The decoration of such a room is dictated by its name, e.g., "Venetian Room," "A Corner of Paris," "London Lounge." All rooms should have easy access to the kitchen, lobby, and parking lots, and be serviced in the same manner as the main ballroom.
The caterer with no banquet hall accounts for much of the catering business. He has a kitchen, commissary, and staff but no rooms for serving. No food is consumed on the premises. All serving is done in a variety of locations, and the menus offered must be extremely flexible to fit the wide variety of facilities he will find at the different locations. (Banquet hall caterers may also do off-premise catering, but often do not wish to tie up their equipment and staff for these affairs, except in the case of very large affairs such as conventions.)
The off-premise caterer offers highly personalized service, since the caterer always goes to the customer. The location of the affair may not always be in the customer's home, but in various clubs, temples, and churches, as well as public meeting halls and business offices.
Off-premise caterers also account for a large volume of "delivery only" and "take-out" business.
To discuss the details of the service, the client may come to the commissary-office, or the caterer may go to the client's home or office. Theoretically, the menu should be exactly what the client desires. However, since limited facilities will necessarily limit the menu, the caterer should see the kitchen and familiarize himself with the arrangements of the area where he will work before planning the menu. Where no kitchen facilities are available, as at office parties, the caterer must supply a portable stove, beating units, and chafing dishes. Under these conditions, the menu should be kept very simple.
The arrival of heavy industry to the suburbs has brought with it the need for the mobile unit caterer. Even when there is a restaurant in the vicinity, a huge industrial plant might cover vast tracts of land, and meal-times will not allow time for traveling great distances. The snack or break periods often allow just enough time for a cup of coffee and the snack, with no travel time at all. The obvious solution to this problem is to have the snack and coffee come to the worker; hence the need for the mobile unit caterer.
Similar situations arise at small train stations and bus terminals where traffic is not sufficient to support a permanent snack bar or other food dispensing unit. At nonpermanent operations, such as fairs, exhibits, conventions, and construction projects, the people on the job in these locations away from urban restaurant facilities need the mobile unit caterer.
Fleet Operator: Whether the mobile unit is independently owned or part of a fleet, the basic service it offers is the same: to bring light food directly to the worker at his job. When a fleet owner is in charge, he may operate in one of several ways.
1. He may own all the trucks outright and employ drivers, who are actually delivery men or women, on salary, covering stated and specific routes that he outlines. The fleet owner has complete control over the menu and the amount of food and supplies placed on the truck, although he will be guided by the driver's daily order sheet. Drivers turn over all receipts at the end of each day.
2. The fleet owner may lease his trucks on an annual basis, with the understanding that drivers purchase all food and supplies from him. The driver pays for what he takes, and arrangements are made for the return of unsold items. The fleet owner might suggest routes, but it is the lessee's responsibility to find his own stops, plan his own stops, and plan his own routes and delivery schedules. Profits from the day's sales belong to the driver.
3. The fleet owner may rent his trucks on a daily basis, with the price of the rental including food and equipment. The independent driver who has made a contract to cover a one-day special at one of his regular stops can rent the additional truck to increase the volume of his business, until such time as he may be able to lease or purchase the additional truck.
4. An excellent source of additional income for the fleet owner is the sale of sandwiches and paper goods to the independent driver, who may have one or two trucks but no facility to produce his own sandwiches, nor storage space for paper goods purchased in quantity.
Basic restaurant operations will not be covered here except where they concern catered parties. (The restaurant caterer is usually considered a banquet hall caterer, although there are times when he will prepare food to be supplied for off-premise functions such as house parties.)
The restaurant offering rooms for catered affairs assumes that the patron will make his choice of foods from the menu currently in use at the restaurant. Because this meal is part of the restaurant's standard menu, it often costs less than the same meal prepared elsewhere. Specialty restaurants, such as Chinese, Italian, etc., have a built-in appeal for the host who wants that particular kind of food.
In a small operation, the restaurant manager or owner might double as the catering manager. However, if the catering volume is large, a special catering manager and staff would be needed.
The restaurant owner who is looking for the catered affair to increase his business in off hours must consider many things.
1. Is there room for catered parties? Perhaps additional space can be made by cleaning out unused storerooms and decorating them simply but attractively or by partitioning off part of a large dining room.
2. If a catered affair is scheduled during normally busy hours, will regular and new "drop-in" customers be cheated of good food and service because the regular staff is busy with the catered affair?
3. Can the kitchen handle the additional load (even with the addition of new equipment)?
4. Are there newer methods of food production that might be put into practice in the kitchen to increase the output?
5. Would the anticipated additional business warrant the additional expense of redecoration, kitchen equipment, staff, etc.? Because a restaurant is in the food business does not automatically mean that it is in the catering business. When a regular restaurant has the facilities and is making a bid for catered affairs, all its advertising should indicate that facilities for catering are available, and inquiries should be invited.