Wedding Banquet

A wedding banquet is an industrial operation wearing linen. A hundred seated guests need a field kitchen of roughly fifteen square metres, eight to twelve service staff, a bar team, a cold room, a washing station and two to three hundred amperes of power or a generator. The cooking is rarely the hard part; the build, the waves of plating and the timetable are. This is why the good houses quote a site visit before a menu and why a cheap quote at this size is always missing staff hours.

Costs divide roughly into thirds: food and kitchen, staff, and everything that gets hired or built. Expect 140 to 300 euros a guest for food and kitchen in Europe, plus 45 to 80 euros a guest for service, plus rentals, tent, lighting and power. Tuscany and Andalusia deliver this well at the lower end of the range; London, Monaco and New York at the upper.

Two rules save weddings. First, the timetable belongs to the maître d’ and the chef: speeches go between courses, not during them, and every fifteen minutes lost before the first course is fifteen minutes of food standing in a hot cabinet. Second, the final head count is final. Kitchens buy, prep and plate to a number, and a late change of twelve guests is not a small adjustment, it is a different dinner.