Plan Your Meetings

Walk the Buffet Line: September 2006 Morsel

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This month’s morsel is going to focus food placement on buffets. Sounds simple, and yet I am constantly amazed how many different interpretations there are. Allow me to make this as plain as day: Set up the buffet as you would put food on your plate. In other words, use common sense.

Here’s an example: I was working at a hotel in Alabama last month, arranging a dinner buffet for my client. What did the banquet department put first on the buffet? The salad dressing. Now why would you put salad dressing before the salad and the toppings for the salad?

I can’t stress how important it is to walk the buffet line during and after set-up to double-check it for accuracy. There have been many times when I have talked about food placement in the planning stages, only to find that it hasn’t been executed. Why? You can talk something to death with the banquet manager, but that doesn’t guarantee the information will be passed down to the banquet captain.

Claire Gould is the owner of Rx for Catering, LLC, a culinary and logistics company that works globally negotiating and designing menus for meetings and events. Her company has done work for Coca-Cola, IBM, Honeywell and Randstad, among others. Gould teaches and writes about culinary and banquet trends and topics. If you have any feedback for her, please leave a comment below.