A menu can sound incredible and still be completely wrong.
You can fill it with fashionable ingredients, elaborate descriptions and dishes that would look fantastic coming out of a restaurant kitchen.
Then try serving it to 100 people on location.
Suddenly things become rather different.
At Rhubarb Rhubarb Catering, menu development usually starts with a much less glamorous question:
Will this actually work?
Location catering isn’t restaurant service.
We don’t have a dining room full of people arriving specifically to experience our food.
We’re feeding people who are working.
Sometimes they’re outside. Sometimes they’re eating between demanding parts of the schedule. They may have had an extremely early call time or still have hours left before wrap.
That changes what makes a successful dish.
We want our food to look good and taste great, obviously. We’re chefs.
But it also needs to satisfy the person eating it and perform properly within the environment we’re serving it in.
When we’re writing menus, we don’t choose every dish independently.
If the main option is rich and slow-cooked, what accompanies it?
What are we offering alongside the fish?
Does the vegetarian dish provide a genuinely different choice or does it feel like an altered version of something else?
Does the vegan option stand proudly on its own?
Then there are the sides, vegetables and desserts.
A menu is a collection of individual dishes, but lunch is experienced as a complete meal.
Everything needs to make sense together.
Some menu decisions aren’t made months in advance.
British weather has other ideas.
During colder periods, warming comfort food makes sense. Slow-cooked dishes, casseroles, pies and substantial accompaniments can be exactly what a crew needs.
Then summer arrives and suddenly the thought of an enormous heavy meal becomes considerably less appealing.
We adjust.
Seasonality isn’t simply about which ingredients are available. It’s also about what people actually want to eat.
This is one of the questions people outside location catering don’t always consider.
A dish can be beautiful when served immediately.
What happens if it needs to be transported?
What happens if it needs to be individually boxed?
What happens if service is delayed?
We’ve provided individually boxed hot meals for productions where the logistics made a traditional service impractical.
That requires thinking differently about the menu.
Certain dishes travel brilliantly. Others deteriorate quickly.
Choosing the latter because it sounds more impressive isn’t good cooking.
It’s ego.
Our responsibility is to make sure the food is still enjoyable when the crew actually eats it.
We don’t particularly like the idea of writing a menu and then asking, “Right, what are we going to give the vegan?”
That’s backwards.
Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and other dietary requirements should be considered during menu development.
Sometimes a dish naturally works across several requirements. Sometimes something separate is appropriate.
What matters is that it has received the same thought as everything else.
Nobody should feel like an inconvenience because of what they can or cannot eat.
There is sometimes a temptation in catering to believe that food needs an unusual name or twenty ingredients before it becomes impressive.
We disagree.
A beautifully made pie can be brilliant.
So can properly cooked fish, good mashed potato, fresh seasonal vegetables or a curry that has been given the time it deserves.
The skill is in doing familiar food properly and knowing when to introduce something different.
We’re not trying to make somebody stop at the menu board and admire our vocabulary.
We want them to finish lunch and think:
“That was bloody good.”
There isn’t a magic formula.
We consider the crew, the location, the season, the service style, dietary requirements and what else we’ve served during the job.
Then we cook the food we’d be happy putting our name against.
Rhubarb Rhubarb Catering is chef-led for a reason.
We believe the food matters.
We just don’t believe it needs to shout about how clever it is.
Tell us the dates, location and rough crew size and we can start planning. Call us on 07425 221753 or send the details through our contact page and we’ll come back to you.
