Choosing the Appropriate Dining Format for Your Catered Event

When planning a catered event like a wedding or business meeting, one must often decide whether to have a sit down meal or buffet service. A cocktail reception with hors d'oeuvres and food stations is another excellent possibility, as is a family-style meal. Each alternative has its pros and cons, so to decide which will be best for your event; you should determine your goals and priorities. Will your event be formal or informal? Which is most important to you - quantity and variety of food, or quality? Would you prefer to have your guests seated while they eat, or would you rather have them milling about while dining?

During a sit down dinner, the food should be fresh and hot and placed on the plate as each dish is ready to be served. It's true that many hotels and lower-end caterers often put entrees on plates and keep them in a warming area until they are needed. Because of this, food is frequently dried-out or rubbery at events with many guests. Be sure to check with your caterer to find out how they plate hot food, or visit the kitchen of the facility you are considering and watch how things are done.

At a sit down meal, guests are more likely to eat a nutritiously balanced meal the way it is supposed to be eaten. Depending upon the specific event, the food's presentation can be elegant or casual. In either case, the food maintains its integrity and can be served at the correct temperature with the appropriate presentation. In the best case scenario, the food will be served immediately after being cooked and placed on the guest's plate.

At a family-style dinner, guests are seated at a table and the food is served on platters that the guests pass around. Platters of food are available on the table from which guests can serve themselves or a waiter may assist with serving. If long tables are placed end to end to form one long, narrow table, it can look like a scene from a Tuscan villa. While the food presentation and temperature may suffer a bit as food circulates on platters, the family-style format can be an attractive, less formal alternative with a well-designed menu. One disadvantage is that those who are the last to receive food from the platter are unable to appreciate the original presentation of the food.

Buffets are no longer as popular as they once were because hosts are not eager to make their guests stand in line. When guests place various foods on their plates, sauces and flavors may get mixed together. It can be difficult to maintain food at the correct temperature in the buffet format. Chafing dishes are no longer used very often by upscale caterers because food tends to become dried out or overcooked in them. Warmed, regularly rotated platters are preferred for presentation of buffet food instead. During warmer weather, it can also be difficult to keep cold food at the proper temperature on the buffet, an example being salads and sushi, but experienced caterers have ways of handling this. There is often quite a bit of waste with buffet style meals since guests usually take more food than they consume.

The biggest advantage of buffet-style meals is that a broad selection of foods can be served, which can be an excellent choice to help meet guests' various dietary needs and tastes. Because buffet service may require fewer servers, it can be less costly than a sit down event. Since guests must get up to get their food, it is easier for them to interact with each other.

If you are really interested in having your guests mingle, the cocktail reception and/or food station set up are ideal. Usually food stations are available and a server mingles in the crowd passing out hors d'oeuvres. It has become more popular than standard buffets. Food stations are scattered throughout the room and each can have its own theme or they can all have variations on the same theme. Many people use "action stations" in which chefs prepare guests' food to order as they watch and wait, providing fresher, hotter food than what is normally found on a buffet. Meat can be sliced to order, pasta tossed with preferred ingredients, oysters shucked, and sushi rolled to order and placed on the plate right away. As guests drift from station to station getting small plates of food from each, they have a chance to interact with each other.

Combining various formats can be extremely successful; for instance, you may have a sit down main course with a dessert buffet, or perhaps the first course could be served plated with the main course served family-style.

About the Author:
As a gourmet chef, Ethan Mantle enjoys using seasonal and organic ingredients in all his Sonoma catering dishes. He currently owns Componere Fine Catering, a well-known Sonoma wedding catering company.