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Lost in translation: September 2008 Morsel

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As many of you know, I spent last  month working the Olympics in Beijing. For those of you interested in working banquets in China, here are some important things to keep in mind:

1. Replenishment of  chafing dishes — The Chinese don’t do a good job of having back-up readily available, so you need to really review with them when the hotel pans need to be replaced. Do walk through of the back of house to make sure the back-up food is available.
2. Communication — These folks don’t use walkie-talkies, so all departments communicate by cell phone. And, if someone’s cell phone is busy, then you have to wait for their phone line to clear, which is a huge inconvenience when you need four hotel pans refilled.
3. Division of labor — In China, the kitchen controls the food quantities; therefore, they replenish the buffet, not the banqueting staff. You will not see banquet staff running food.
4. Banquet staff — Service is so much better in China, and the look and feel of the servers is much cleaner and more professional than in the U.S.
5. Buffet layouts — They are the same as in the States, except the Chinese don’t do double-sided  buffets. (I also find this to be true in Europe.) The one disappointment was the buffets always looked boring. There was no imagination about how food  was displayed, especially when it came to hot items. Everything got put into chafing dishes, which, as you know, we are trying to get away from  here.
6. Menu item labels — So much about food gets lost in translation, especially the names. Any time you are working abroad, you or your staff should do the menu labels for the buffets. Don’t let the facility’s staff do it, especially if English is a second language, because you never know what they’ll write on the labels.

For anyone interested in reading about my day-to-day adventures of working the Olympics, I did manage to blog almost every day while in China. These postings are available at rxforcatering.com.

— Claire R. Gould

Claire R. 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, and publishes a quarterly online newsletter “The Claire Diaries.” If you have any feedback for her, please leave a comment.