A private lunch in your own boardroom, cooked on site and served quietly, so the meeting stays the point and the food is not the story.

How it works

We arrive ahead of you and cook on site — in your kitchen if there is one, in a field kitchen if there is not. Service is to the table, and front of house are in and out without joining the conversation.

Two courses and coffee for a working lunch; three if it is a client lunch or a board dinner.

The menu

From the dinner party menus, scaled for the middle of a working day: pan-seared scallops with crispy prosciutto, rack of lamb, a poached pear afterwards. Something light enough that the afternoon still happens.

Bowl food if you would rather people moved. Afternoon tea for a later meeting.

Discretion

We work in private houses for clients who value not being talked about, and a boardroom is no different. Staff are briefed to work around a conversation rather than through it, and nothing about who we cooked for goes near our social media.

Why a boardroom lunch is harder than it looks

Eight people, ninety minutes, and a conversation that matters more than the food. The catering has to be good enough to notice and quiet enough to ignore, which is a narrower target than a wedding.

The clock is not ours. Meetings overrun. If the food is built to be served at one o’clock and only at one o’clock, it fails the moment the morning session runs twenty minutes late. We build a lunch that holds, and we take our timing from whoever is chairing rather than from the kitchen.

Nobody wants to be handed a plate they cannot manage. If people are still working, or expected back on a call at two, the food should not need cutting up with concentration. That is a real constraint and it shapes the menu more than taste does.

The dietary requirements are not optional. On a table of eight, one person given a visibly lesser plate is noticed by everyone. A vegan main course at a directors’ lunch should look like the reason to choose it.

Where it happens

Usually your own building — a boardroom, a meeting room, occasionally a kitchen that has not been used for anything but coffee in a decade. We work around what is there and bring the rest. There is no minimum requirement beyond somewhere to set down.

If your offices are not suitable, The Outlook at Fox’s Marina can be given over for a private lunch, which some clients prefer for a client meeting or a board away-day.

Related

For larger numbers or a company evening, see corporate event catering. For a standing reception or a launch, bowl food works better than a seated lunch. For a long meeting that needs feeding twice, afternoon tea is the usual second service.

We invoice the company against a purchase order rather than asking anyone to settle up on the day.

The room, and what it can take

Most boardrooms were designed for paper and laptops rather than plates, and it shows the moment lunch arrives. A table covered in documents has nowhere to put a main course, and nobody wants to move the papers halfway through a negotiation.

It is worth deciding in advance whether people eat at the meeting table or move away from it. Moving is better if the session is long — twenty minutes away from the table is worth more to a tired room than twenty minutes of eating over their notes. If moving is not possible, the menu should be built for a table with limited space, which is a real constraint and one we would rather design around than discover.

Smell, which nobody thinks about

A meeting room holds the smell of lunch for the rest of the afternoon. Fish, strong curry and anything heavily fried are a poor choice for a room people have to sit in until five, however good they taste.

It sounds fussy. It is the sort of thing that gets noticed by everybody and mentioned by nobody, and it is one of the small reasons a catered lunch is remembered as good or bad.

Regular arrangements

Several of the companies we cook for have a standing arrangement — a monthly board lunch, or a quarterly client afternoon — where the menu rotates and nobody has to decide anything each time.

That is usually the most useful way to do this: a conversation once about what the room likes and what it cannot eat, and then it simply happens. It also means the food improves, because we learn what worked.