About Us

Fifteen years of getting food out on time

We have been feeding weddings and events in East Anglia for over fifteen years, and the team came out of restaurants as well as events — which matters more than it sounds. Restaurant kitchens teach you to send four hundred covers without the twentieth being worse than the first. Event kitchens teach you to do it in a field, off a generator, with the weather changing.

What that buys you is not a style of cooking. It is the boring end: a running order that survives the speeches over-running, enough staff that nobody is waiting, and food that arrives at the temperature it left the kitchen. We would rather be judged on the fiftieth plate than the first.

The same team designs the menu, cooks it and serves it. Nobody is subcontracted in on the morning, which is why we can tell you in advance what will actually happen on the day.

Weddings
Celebrations
Dinner Parties
Shooting Parties
Garden Parties
Buffets
Cocktail Receptions
Corporate Events
Directors Lunches

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Beef tartare with pickled shallots, herb emulsion and edible flowers, plated on a white dish

Pork belly main course with a potato terrine, charred chicory, spinach and carrot puree, served at a wedding breakfast

How the business is actually put together

Reeves Events is a small company that does a large amount of work, which is only possible because the same people do several jobs. The person who quotes your wedding is in the building when it is cooked. There is no account manager who hands you over to an operations team you never meet.

We cook from a commercial kitchen at Mickfield, near Stowmarket, and we run our own restaurant, The Outlook at Fox’s Marina in Ipswich. That second part matters more than it sounds. A restaurant open to the public five days a week keeps a kitchen sharp in a way that events work on its own does not, and it means you can eat our food on a Saturday without booking us for anything.

What we are good at, and what we are not

Good at: cooking properly for large numbers somewhere that was not designed for it. A field, a barn, a walled garden, a unit base on a location. Bringing the kitchen, the power and the people, and getting hot food out on a schedule that somebody else set.

Also good at: the unglamorous half. Running orders, timings, dietary requirements handled properly, and somebody controlling the room while it happens.

Not: we are not a full wedding planner, and we say so on that page rather than selling the day-of service as though it were one. We are also not the cheapest, and we would rather lose a job on price than win it and under-staff it.

Suppliers and provenance

Menus are built around what is good that month, from growers and farms close enough to drive to. Red Poll beef, Newmarket Musk sausages, glazed Suffolk ham, English asparagus when it is actually in season rather than flown in against the calendar.

That is not primarily a sustainability position, although it helps. It is the reason the food tastes of somewhere. A caterer buying entirely from a national wholesaler can produce a perfectly competent plate, and it will taste exactly like the same plate in Surrey.

The practical details

We hold a 5-star food hygiene rating. Our kitchen handles all fourteen declared allergens and is not a nut-free or gluten-free environment — we state that plainly rather than implying otherwise, because on an allergy it is the difference that matters.

We are fully insured, we work to the venue’s requirements on documentation, and we will send risk assessments and certificates to a venue or a production office without being chased for them.

We cater across Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire. If you are outside that, ask — the honest answer depends on the date.

Who you will actually deal with

On most enquiries you will speak to two or three people at most, and they will be the same two or three from the first email to the week after the event. That is deliberate. Catering goes wrong at handovers — between sales and operations, between the office and the kitchen, between the caterer and the venue — and the simplest way to stop it is to have fewer of them.

The team is around a dozen full-time, and considerably more on a summer Saturday. Front of house staff are not agency bodies sent by a supplier who has never met us; they are people who have worked our events before and know how we run a room.