Now it’s time to work out your catering plan and how to achieve this. You need to sort out in your mind, and on paper, what you will be able to offer your clients in the kitchen space you have, and the amount of time you will be able to commit to your business if you are running it from home. You, of course, may have a fixed idea – the reason why you thought of being a caterer in the first place – how you wish to grab the attention of your possible clients. You may have been testing recipes and have a good source of cook and reference books to guide you. Or you may be starting from scratch and need to think through very carefully what you will offer. This chapter covers:

Working Out What You Can Do

Important questions to ask yourself:

• How many people can I cater for in my kitchen if I am the sole cook? If it’s a small kitchen, you can possibly do small buffet and dinner parties as well as canapés.
• What kind of menus can I realistically manage? You might not have sufficient refrigeration for a lot of food, either for preparation or storage. In which case, offer more simple food. On the other hand, you might have a large dedicated kitchen to prepare enough food for a buffet for 250 and sit down dinners for 150.
• How am I going to create menus for my clients? Start writing down food you love cooking and then create balanced menus with a number of options which will fit into your style of cooking.
• What kind of sample menus would be best to sell my business? As many people have conservative tastes, it may be best to have several menus which are ‘safe’, and others which mirror your more eclectic style of cooking and produce choice.
• What kind of kitchen space is available to me at the venue? If the space is minimal, the chosen menu must reflect this.

 

I have given some possible replies, and more information follows. But some of these questions only you can assess as skills, knowledge, experience and your premises will differ. You may be a caterer already but wish to change the type of catering you offer. If you are a complete novice or one without too much experience, advice follows.

Compiling A Menu

What You Like To Cook

My advice is to put on sample menus what you like to cook. It obviously has to be reasonably broad or else you will go out of business. What if you don’t like cooking fish? Unless you have set yourself up as a vegetarian caterer, customers will be confused when they ask for whole cooked salmon, a delicate prawn starter, or a fish soup and, for example, you decline to give them a quote for these dishes. They will go elsewhere.

Keep Up With Trends

As one in three of us eats out once a week these days, one way to see what people like eating is to read as many restaurant menus as possible. The tendency to eat more light food is a trend. But do offer food that reflects your business, not just a copycat version of what everyone else does. Give your business your own stamp, your unique selling point.

Read food magazines, food articles in newspapers, leaf through new cookery books. Keep in touch, in other words, with what is happening in the food world.

Skills Come Gradually

Don’t expect to be a skilled caterer from the start. It is not feasible, unless you have had a lot of experience cooking, to be a complete professional. Skills will come gradually and so will your knowledge of how to handle clients, what to put on your menus and what works in your kitchen.