Catering is the business that provides food at basically any facility, area or location where all of the necessary equipment needed to prepare the food can be set up properly. In other words catering services are sort of like restaurants on wheels, in the sense that you don’t go to them, but rather they come to you instead. Aside from their mobility, they have a lot of things in common with standard restaurants, like the fact that they both require quite a large number of different items and pieces of equipment in order to be able to do complete their task of feeding the customers properly.
While most of the commercial catering equipment that is available is meant to accommodate for nearly any type of meal or preparation of ingredients, you will still want to not branch out with too many different choices. Instead of trying to serve up a smorgasbord or different food items that will most likely have to be thrown out at the end of the day, try to simply include items from all of the different food groups. Also, try to anticipate what your clients might like more depending on the venue you are commissioned for, but if that fails, simply take note of the food that is most popular and the food that is always left behind and make adjustments accordingly.
The most important items out of all the available commercial catering equipment you will need are the tables as they are in essence the skeleton of the whole operation on which both your food and drinks sections will need to be laid out. Next, you will need a lot of different types of silverware, plates and glasses. The more variation there is in the food and the drinks you have available, the larger the variety of utensils and mugs you will need to prepare. That is of course only the equipment you’ll need for the customers, and you will need to get all of the necessary items for the food preparation as well.
It’s an inevitable part of the job that there will either be too much food left over or too little to go around, and if you have a choice always go for too much left over. The customer may be always right, but he is rarely accurate with his calculations, so always bring more that the number they estimate. Even if it turns out that the number of people is correct, or is in fact lower, most of them usually overestimate themselves and take much more than they are capable of consuming anyway. At the end of the day, when the people have left and all of the remaining food has been gathered up, giving away any untouched food items is always the better alternative to throwing it away or trying to serve it again.
