The biggested fear for ALL of us, clients and myself, is running out of food. I can't promise we will not run out of something but I can promise we will do our very very best not to. So we have agreed to put into play all the industry "tricks" that we have in our back pocket.
The first is to use a slightly smaller plate. This will help cut down on the guest piling to food on to high and waisting uneaten food. They are more then welcomed to come back for seconds.
Secondly the order we place the food in on the buffet. We are only giving the guest the one plate to fit 7 items on. It is common to see people put more quanities of the first items on their plates but as their plate fills up the quanities get smaller because they are running out of room. It is an industry secret to always put the meat at the end and the least expensive stuff at the begining. A lot of time, rolls go at the end because it is easy to just place your piece of bread on top but not this time. Again because the clients greast fear is running out of food (which should also be any caterers greatest fear) we have decided this will be the order of the buffett: Pasta salad (we went with pasta salad because it is easier to handle off-premis in a parking lot in August then a leafy salad would be), rolls and butter (hoping that it will take up a little space on the plate so that guest will not put more food on there plate then needed, green beans, red skin pototoes, carrot souffle (we have decided to do a blue scoop instead of a green scoop - with less room on the plate we think we can get away with a slightly smaller serving. A blue scoop is 1 ounce less then a green scoop which for this event means 9,200 ounces less ounce of carrot souffle - that is 68 less pans we will have to produce), chicken, beef short ribs.
Severs - we are to put a person behind each of the hot items to serve the guest. Controlling the portion everyone puts on there plates. We know that the plan is for everyone to take one chicken breast, but the 9200 guest being served that evening don't know that. It bothers me a little that such a mile stone event for such a great company will have buffets, NO I mean food stations, that resemble a cafeteria lunch room style service, but there is no way around it. I wish there was a theme to the event. Then at least we could dress then up with a purpose but there isn't...... so the best I can do is black aprons with the COOK 50th Logo on the front and black floppy chef hats.
Station Design - Working with Dodds to come up with a Station design was fun. The goals were to get people through as fast as possible, get as much out on the station as possible, double sided but served. We now call our stations the bullets and there are 12 of them around the room. 12 Double sided equals 24 lines. So that is 383 guest through a line. Over 3 hours. Thats 127 an hour, 31 every 15 minutes, 2 a minute. Thats not to bad........right?
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