What people mean by a buffet

Almost everybody who asks us about a wedding buffet is asking the same question: how do we feed everyone well without a formal three-course sit-down? There are three honest answers to that, and they are quite different jobs.

A buffet is food set out on a service table that guests come up and help themselves to. A sharing or feasting table is the same food brought to the guests, laid down the middle of the table for people to pass between themselves. Bowl food is small hot dishes carried round on trays while people stand and talk.

People search for “buffet”. Caterers tend to say “sharing” or “feasting”, partly because the word buffet carries the memory of a village-hall trestle with cling film on it. We are not precious about the word. We are precious about how it is run, because a buffet is the format where the gap between good and bad catering shows up fastest.

Where buffets go wrong

Every bad wedding buffet fails in one of four ways, and all four are avoidable.

The queue. One hundred and twenty people and a single service table is a forty-minute queue, and the last thirty guests eat cold food while watching the first thirty finish. Two service points running the same food halves it. Three quarters it. This is arithmetic, not luxury.

The temperature. Hot food that has sat out for half an hour is not hot food. It needs to be held at temperature and replenished in small batches from the kitchen rather than laid out all at once at the start.

The abandonment. The cheapest way to run a buffet is to set it down and leave. That is why buffets have the reputation they have. Ours are staffed — someone serving, someone clearing, someone watching the trays.

The last table. Whoever is seated furthest from the food is at the back of every queue and gets the scrapings of every tray. We call the tables up in a deliberate order and reset the display between them, so table twelve gets what table one got.

How we actually run one

The food is cooked on site, in our own kitchen at the venue — in a marquee that means a full field kitchen brought in and built. Nothing is cooked in Suffolk in the morning and driven to a field to be reheated.

Numbers set the shape. Under about sixty guests, one well-run service point is usually enough. Between sixty and a hundred and fifty we would normally run two, mirrored, so both ends of the room move at the same speed. Above that we would rather talk you into a sharing table, because at that scale bringing food to people beats moving people to food.

Dietary requirements do not go on the main table where they can be contaminated by a serving spoon. They are plated separately, labelled, and brought out to the person by name. See our vegan and vegetarian menus for how we handle it when it is most of the room rather than four guests.

Buffet or sharing table?

If you want the room up and moving and talking to people they did not come with, a buffet does that — it is the format that breaks up table groups. If you want the room seated, warm and noisy, a sharing table does that better, and it removes the queue entirely.

Cost is not the deciding factor people expect it to be. A buffet is not automatically cheaper than a served meal: it is usually more food, because you cannot portion it, and it needs the same staff on the floor. What it buys you is informality, not savings. Anyone telling you a buffet is the budget option is planning to under-staff it.

Evening buffets are a separate job

The evening food is a different problem from the wedding breakfast. People have already eaten, they have been drinking for four hours, half of them are dancing and the other half want something in their hand without sitting down.

That wants street food, baps, or something cooked in front of people rather than a second full buffet, which almost always goes to waste. It should land later than you think — usually around nine — and it should be eaten standing up.

Menus

Nothing here is a fixed package. The menus below are where conversations start:

• Sharing and feasting menus
• Barbecue and summer menus
• Evening and street food menus
• Bowl food menus
• Vegan and vegetarian menus

We cater across Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire. If you tell us the venue, the date and roughly how many people, we will tell you what we would do and what it would cost. Get in touch, or read what is included and how booking works.