A shoot day does not wait for a caterer, and that is the entire brief.

Elevenses have to be at the drive at half past eleven, not back at the house at noon. Dinner has to be on the table when the guns come in, not forty minutes later. Everything else — and the food is good — comes second to those two facts.

Elevenses go to the guns

We come to the drive. Nobody walks back for it, and nobody stands about while a vehicle is found.

Gala pie or a raised game pie, something hot to drink, and it is done in ten minutes without breaking the rhythm of the day. It sounds like a small thing. Ask anyone who has stood in a wet gateway waiting for a caterer who did not turn up.

Lunch is a decision, not a default

In the field or at the lodge, depending on how the day is built. Seasonal soup, homemade sausage rolls, sausages in a bun, pulled pork in a bun.

The mistake is making lunch too big. A heavy lunch costs you the afternoon, and the guns know it even if nobody says so.

Dinner is where the day is won

Pheasant casserole with cider and apples. Oxtail stew. Red Poll beef bourguignon. Lancashire hot pot. Lamb shanks in a rich red wine sauce. Then treacle tart or an English apple and blackberry pie, and local cheese with chutney.

None of it is complicated and all of it is cooked properly, which in this context is the higher compliment.

The bit that separates operators

A drive will overrun. It always does.

Holding a dinner hot for an unpredictable period without the food suffering is the difference between a caterer who has done a hundred shoot days and one who has done three. Nobody should be eating a dried-out casserole because the last drive ran long, and with the right equipment and the right plan nobody has to.

Book the season, not the day

Most shoots book a block of days rather than one at a time, and it works better for everyone. We rotate the menu across the season so the same guns are not eating the same casserole in November and January, and it is one contact, one invoice and one agreed running order for every day.

It also means the food gets better as the season goes on, because we learn what that particular set of guns actually eats.

Your own birds

If the shoot wants its own game cooked, we will do it, given reasonable notice and a bird that arrives hung, plucked and dressed.

It is worth doing at least once a season. It is the best pheasant anyone on that day will eat, and it closes a loop that most shoots leave open.

Before the season starts

Now is the time to have this conversation, not in the second week of October.

More on shoot lunch catering, and the full shoot menu.