Full-Service Event Catering

Full service is not a bigger order. It is a different job. Drop-off catering ends when the trays are on the table; full service starts there — with a crew that arrives hours early, a kitchen built where there was not one, a captain holding the timeline, and a team that leaves the room cleaner than it found it. The cooking is the part we worry about least.

We staff events across Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade: corporate dinners, milestone birthdays, fundraisers, holiday parties, and private events in homes, venues, and rooms with nothing in them but a floor. Weddings have their own page, because they have their own problems.

What full service actually covers

The phrase gets used loosely, so here is what it means on our proposals. If one of these lines is missing from somebody else's quote, it has not disappeared. It has moved onto your to-do list.

Staff on site

Servers, kitchen staff, and a captain, scheduled by role and by hour. A buffet for eighty and a plated dinner for eighty are the same food and a very different staffing bill.

Setup

Stations built and styled, tables dressed, chafers and hot boxes staged, service ware counted in. Most of it happens in the two to four hours before your first guest walks in.

Service

Food cooked or finished on site, then passed, plated, or replenished, with clearing running all night. Plates come off tables as people finish, not in one sweep at the end.

Breakdown

Trash out, rentals repacked and counted, surfaces wiped, room handed back to the venue. Venues remember which caterers do this and which ones drive away at eleven.

The equipment behind it

Ovens, hot boxes, refrigeration, prep tables, and the power to run them, for any room without a kitchen. That covers most raw spaces, most backyards, and more venues than you would expect.

The four service styles, and what each costs in staff

This is the first decision on the page, and it is barely about food. Service style sets your staff count, your equipment list, and how long dinner takes. Everything else is fitted around it.

Plated

Roughly one server per ten to twelve guests, because every plate is carried out and carried back. The tightest control over temperature and portion, and the tightest timeline. It is the most staff-heavy option, and it is why the same menu quotes higher plated than it does on a buffet.

Buffet

About one server per twenty, plus attendants on the line. Fewer staff, more food — guests serve themselves generously — and more holding equipment. One double-sided line moves roughly a hundred guests in half an hour; past that, add a second line rather than more servers.

Family-style

Platters to the table for guests to pass. Staffing lands between plated and buffet and closer to plated, because platters are carried, refilled, and cleared. It needs more food than plated, since the last platter has to still look full when it reaches the far seat, and it needs table space you may not have once chargers, glassware, and centrepieces are down.

Stations

Two or more attended points around the room, each with its own equipment and usually its own attendant. Staffing sits between buffet and plated; equipment sits above both. The right answer when the guest list spans several food cultures, or when you want people moving and talking instead of seated for two hours.

What a captain actually does

A captain is one named person running your floor, and on most events they are the difference between a service that flows and a service that gets chased. They see the room before the date, build the run sheet against your timeline, and then spend the night making the hundred small calls nobody should be bringing to you.

Concretely: when to call the room to their seats, when to hold entrées because the speeches ran twelve minutes long, whether the second buffet line opens now or in five, which table has the nut allergy, where the band and the photographer eat, and when the room is clear enough to start stripping the back stations. They are also the person the venue manager finds when something is wrong, which is the entire point.

Load-in, breakdown, and the hours you pay for

This is the line that surprises people most, so we say it early: staff are billed from load-in, not from the moment guests arrive. A four-hour party is not four hours of labour. Count the drive, the build, the service, and the strip-down and it is usually closer to eight or nine. From June through November we build a wet-weather plan into that schedule too — where the buffet moves to, how long the move takes, and who makes the call — because deciding it at four o'clock in the rain goes badly.

• Travel and load-in. Trucks unloaded through whatever door the venue allows, which is sometimes a service lift with a booked window and sometimes a lawn and a long walk.
• Setup, usually two to four hours. Kitchen built, stations dressed, chafers to temperature, service ware counted. Longer when there is no kitchen, or when the room is only released to us late.
• Service. The part you are picturing — cocktail hour, dinner, dessert, and clearing throughout.
• Breakdown, usually an hour to ninety minutes. Rentals counted back into their crates, trash removed, floors and surfaces returned to the venue's standard.
• Overtime, which exists because events run long. We would rather write the trigger into the proposal than surprise you with it on an invoice, so ask what the threshold is and what an extra hour costs before you sign.

Rentals, and who owns the list

Plates, glassware, flatware, linens, chafers, tables, and sometimes the kitchen itself come from a rental house, and on a full-service event we will order them against your final floor plan. The important part is not who orders them. It is that exactly one person does. Venues build rental lists and planners build rental lists, and when both do it, you pay for two sets of water glasses and store the spares in a hallway.

The limitation worth saying out loud: rentals are ordered off a count, and that count comes from your final numbers. A guest list still moving in the last week moves the rental order with it, and late changes are the one part of this we cannot always absorb. Give us the real number as early as you can live with and we will hold a small buffer instead of a large one. Two things we will not do: staff a room we have not walked or at least seen a floor plan and photographs of, and quote a staff count off a guest number alone. If you are planning a wedding, that page covers what is specific to it — the ceremony-to-dinner gap, the tasting, cultural menus built with the family — and everything here still applies.