Fandango Catering and Events: How Caterers Choose Their Menus (Part I)

We belong to a group called Association of Catering Professionals, some of whose members in its forum last week discussed how they choose menu items or, as chefs prefer to call them, recipes.
This is very timely for us as we just launched our 2011 menus, and today I'm going to give readers an inside look at how caterers choose their menus (or recipes).
This is not as simple as it seems and provides a lot of inside info that most people (except caterers) don't know, or...



Why Grandmother Aurora Isn't Really Our Culinary Muse


Via the Association of Catering Professionals e-discussion, we were astonished to learn that a surprising number of caterers use only, or mostly, their family recipes. We don't have any old family recipes that we could serve to our discriminating clientele. I've written about my grandmother, Aurora Padilla, here in the blog before. She was born in Valencia, Spain, orphaned, and at 14 married my grandfather Benito Ríos (a Polish Jewish escapee from the tsar's army who was granted asylum in Spain and whose real name was Wladislaw Benjamin Rostok), then when my father was two they emigrated to Mexico and later to Texas. By all accounts she was an excellent cook, masterful at both Spanish and Mexican cooking. But our clients expect more than that kind of food, and we give it to them.

This brings me to how caterers choose menu items. The breakdown is roughly as follows:

• Family recipes (not us)
• What other caterers are doing (not us)
• What other caterers have done in the past (not us)
• Cookbooks, food magazines, the Web, and food shows (us, with tweaks and improvements)
• Chefs' original ideas (us, with tweaks and improvements)

We believe that our clients and prospective clients should help guide our menu selections, not so much the other way around. That's why we no longer e-mail even our few fixed menus of last year (we have always had custom menus) to prospective clients, instead choosing and sending from huge binders, updated annually and on a rolling basis, of suggested items by category (for example, American Bistro/dinner, Spanish, hors d'oeuvres). Our clients know and appreciate this. After all, this is the age of customization, personalization, and niches.

And true chefs--that is, true culinary artists--get bored preparing the same food all the time, which is why truly talented chefs rarely go into catering unless they own the business and/or have full artistic license (and why talented chefs change restaurants constantly).


For our 2011 menus we just finished combing through over THREE HUNDRED cookbooks and food magazines, plus about 50 pages of notes for recipe ideas. We also added, because we've had inquiries, Intermezzo (palate cleansing, generally sorbet) and cheese course options as well as dessert trios (NOT quads, which are hard to plate and require those square plates I despise). Obviously these aren't for everyone. But isn't it good to know they're available, just like a great wide selection of hors d'oeuvres for the young professional's or business cocktail party is there too?



The point is that we believe caterers should be responsive to their clients and potential clients and be less concerned with what's easy and cheap for them (like buying partially-made food from big suppliers). So we also have selected this year menu items that are not trendy for trendy's sake. In fact, retro elegance is "in"--or maybe it's always been there and now a majority of people, from twenties to boomers to mature folks, all full of life, find it makes them happy at an event in ways that bento boxes and triangular risers (or square plates) didn't.
Next time: Why more caterers are moving toward buying local (and why that's a good thing)



Warmly,
Kristina
Kristina Ríos de Lumbreras, Ph.D.
Director of Sales and Operations/Event Manager
Fandango Catering and Events
(713) 522-0077
info@fandango-catering.com
http://www.fandango-catering.com/