How do you choose the caterer?

At most weddings catering is the largest single line item and at the same time the one couples see through least. That is because a quote states a price per head, and that number hides almost everything: how many courses, how much staff, how long the service runs, what equipment, which kitchen.

This piece breaks the decision into the four questions that actually create differences. Putting the menu together is not the subject here — that is under menu planning for wedding catering. Here it is about choosing the supplier.

Choosing a service style is not a matter of taste but a decision about time, movement and conversation in the room. It fixes how long the meal takes and how often your guests get up.

Two practical notes. A buffet for 90 people with a single serving line creates a twenty-minute queue; two lines accessible from both sides halve it. So do not ask whether there is a buffet, ask how many serving points get set up. And plated service ties your guests to their chairs for an hour and a half to two hours — which is exactly the window in which the drinks reception would otherwise still be working and people would be changing tables.

The service style feeds straight back into the seating plan: family style needs tables that can hold serving bowls, roaming canapes work almost without fixed places. Planning both together saves a round — the basics are under planning the seating chart.

Before you compare suppliers, settle one single question with your venue: what kitchen is available, and may an outside caterer use it? That answer decides the shortlist more often than any tasting does.

Three situations occur:

• Full kitchen, outside catering permitted. The comfortable case. Every service style is possible, including plated service with hot plates.
• The venue insists on its own kitchen. Many venues let only their own operation cook, or charge a fee when an external supplier comes in. That is legitimate and it is in the venue contract — read that clause before you request quotes, or you will request them for nothing.
• No kitchen. Barn, marquee, garden, empty hall. The caterer then brings a mobile kitchen, and that is its own line item with its own space, power and water requirements.

In the third case, questions arrive that nobody else asks: how much space does the mobile kitchen need, how is it wired, where is the water connection, where does the waste go, and how far is it from the kitchen to the tables? An eighty-metre walk across a field changes every service style, and it is the reason such venues serve buffets more often than plated meals.

Settle as well what food-hygiene requirements apply to preparing food outside a fixed kitchen. Those rules are set by the responsible authority in each country, and a professional caterer knows them for their own market — ask, and ask to see current proof of registration or inspection. With self-organised catering that responsibility sits with you instead, and that is the point at which the apparent saving can turn.

The most striking difference between two quotes at the same price per head almost always lies in the staffing. It is the only item that can be cut without becoming visible in the quote — and the only one your guests notice immediately on the night.

So ask specifically:

1. How many service staff are planned in, and for how many guests each?
2. How many people are working in the kitchen?
3. From when are they there, and until when do they stay?
4. Who clears down, who washes up, who puts the furniture back?
5. What does an extra hour cost, and how late can we book it?
6. Is there a person in charge on site, and what is their name?

As a rough orientation, explicitly as practical experience rather than a norm: plated service needs considerably more staff than a buffet, and an evening with drinks served at the table more than one with a drinks station. If two quotes differ in price by a fifth, the difference usually sits here — not in the quality of the ingredients.

Question 4 is the one most often missing and most expensively added later. If nobody is scheduled for clearing down and packing up, your witnesses end up doing it at two in the morning. Settle with the venue at the same time by when everything has to be out — that time is a hard limit and it determines how long the caterer has to stay.

Question 6 sounds banal and is the difference between an evening with and without queries reaching you. It needs a person with a name and a phone number who is allowed to make decisions — and that number is one of the few your witnesses should also have.

Every catering contract has a deadline by which you give the final headcount. From that moment you are billed for it, even if guests drop out. That deadline is the most important date in your entire planning, because money hangs on it — commonly somewhere between one and three weeks before the date, depending on the caterer, but the exact rule is in your contract and follows the law of the country you book in. Read that clause before you sign, and settle three things:

From that follows a simple rule for your own planning: your RSVP deadline for guests sits before the caterer's deadline, with enough space for a chasing round. If you only start chasing once the caterer already needs the number, you report an estimate and pay for chairs nobody sits on.

This is exactly where a digital RSVP earns its keep. A list that updates itself the moment somebody accepts or declines gives you a defensible number on the cut-off date instead of an extrapolation from messages, calls and scraps of paper — and it collects, in passing, the details the caterer would otherwise have to ask for one by one. What that looks like in practice is under online RSVP for your wedding, and how to keep the guest list alongside it under managing the guest list online; the feature itself is described on the RSVP page.

Two details are worth collecting at the same time, because the caterer needs them anyway: children with ages — for smaller portions and different prices — and dietary requirements. How to pass the latter on so that they actually reach the kitchen is under telling the caterer about allergies.

When two or three suppliers are left, one last check costs nothing: ask for two weddings of roughly your size and at a comparable kind of venue. An operation that normally does corporate events in function rooms is not automatically bad for a barn — but it has not yet carried anything across a field.

What to watch in the final selection:

• Experience with your venue. Someone who knows the place knows the kitchen, the routes and the set-up times. That saves a site visit and a lot of assumptions.
• How they handle vegetarian and vegan. The usable answer is a dish in its own right, not the side without the meat.
• Sourcing and season. Anyone offering strawberries in February has not read the calendar.
• Clarity of the quote. Are crockery, glassware, linen, transport and set-up itemised, or do they disappear into a lump sum?
• Tax and how it is shown. Food, service charges and gratuities are not taxed the same way in every market, and in some they are not taxed at all. Ask which rate is inside the quote and whether the prices are shown with or without it — otherwise you are comparing two numbers that do not mean the same thing.

Only once those points are settled is a tasting worth doing. It is the most expensive selection step and the least informative one when it comes too early — what to pay attention to during it is under the menu tasting.

And lay the quotes out line by line before you decide. Two catering quotes are almost never written to the same shape; how to make them comparable anyway is under comparing quotes.