The Banquet Chef

Banquet cooking is an operations discipline. The menu is chosen for what can be plated identically in waves of forty and held for eleven minutes without damage, the kitchen is built that morning on grass, and the whole evening is a sequence of timed pushes coordinated with a maître d’. Creativity is constrained by design, which is why great banquet food tastes deliberately simple.

The numbers matter more than the recipes: one kitchen hand per twenty five guests, 1.5 square metres of tent kitchen per ten guests, hot cabinets for every hot course, a cold room, a washing station and enough power. A quote that lacks any of these is not cheaper, it is incomplete, and the first symptom is a main course at 52 degrees.

Rates are 900 to 2,200 euros for the chef plus the brigade, typically 18 to 40 euros per guest for kitchen labour alone at a hundred covers. The chefs who do this properly are rarely the ones with the most photographed plating, and they are the reason a wedding dinner for a hundred can be genuinely good.