There is something slightly strange about working at a major sporting event and seeing almost none of it.
While thousands of people are watching what is happening on the pitch, our attention is usually somewhere completely different.
What’s coming out of the oven? How many people have eaten? Has the next department broken for lunch? Do we need another tray of vegetables? And has somebody remembered to put the peas on?
Welcome to catering for outside broadcast.
The broadcast you watch at home involves a huge team working behind the scenes.
Production, cameras, sound, engineering, graphics and countless other roles all have their own responsibilities and timings.
That creates an interesting challenge for catering.
You aren’t necessarily feeding everybody simultaneously.
Some crew members can break immediately. Others have to wait. Some need to be back at their position quickly.
Our job is to make sure the person arriving later receives the same standard of meal as the person who came through first.
That’s where planning and hot holding become just as important as cooking.
A large part of an OB catering day happens nowhere near the venue.
Menus need to be balanced across multiple days so crews aren’t seeing the same food repeatedly.
We look at the proteins, cooking methods, accompaniments and flavours across the run rather than treating each day in isolation.
For the live cricket fixtures we’ve catered, that has meant providing a choice across meat, fish, vegetarian and vegan dishes alongside suitable starches, fresh vegetables and desserts.
And because you’re feeding many of the same people repeatedly, variety matters.
If we’ve served a rich braised dish one day, we don’t necessarily want another heavy plate the following afternoon.
You’re building a sequence of menus, not just individual lunches.
British sport provides a fairly unique menu-planning challenge.
You can be planning for sunshine and discover you’re serving lunch while everyone outside is wearing waterproofs.
Weather influences what people want to eat.
A warming dish can be exactly what somebody wants after spending hours outside on a cold day. During genuinely hot weather, that same meal can feel completely wrong.
We can’t control the forecast.
We can make sensible decisions around it.
Not everything behind the scenes is terribly exciting.
Sometimes success looks like having enough peas.
When you’re serving a large crew, consistency comes from dozens of small things being right at the same time.
The main dish needs to be ready. The vegetarian and vegan options need to be available. Potatoes or rice need to be cooked properly. Vegetables need to remain fresh. Desserts need to be ready for service.
And all of that has to continue while people arrive in waves.
There isn’t much point producing one spectacular component if everything around it falls apart.
It’s one of the reasons we believe good catering is as much about organisation as culinary skill.
There’s a real sense of community behind live broadcasting.
You’re feeding people through long working days, often across multiple fixtures, and you start seeing familiar faces returning to the kitchen.
You learn what people enjoy. Conversations continue from one event to another. The catering becomes part of the working environment rather than simply somewhere people collect food.
That’s the bit we enjoy most.
Rhubarb Rhubarb Catering provides outside broadcast catering across the UK, supporting crews working behind live sport and other broadcast events.
The spectators may be watching the action.
We’ll probably still be worrying about the peas.
Planning an outside broadcast or live sport fixture? Tell us the dates, venue and crew numbers and we’ll take it from there. Call us on 07425 221753 or send the details through our contact page and we’ll come back to you.
