Catering Saturday: how a marquee distorts the à la carte forecast
Guaranteed numbers for a wedding do not leave the dining room empty. They leave it oddly full of two-tops who refused the function menu and still expect the fish.
A country pub with a marquee often treats the restaurant as closed once 80 wedding guests are confirmed. The floor still takes six two-tops who want the à la carte because they could not book the function. The pass then runs two menus with one brigade, and the fish that was prepped for 12 restaurant covers is gone by 19:00.
When we write a banquet and marquee load we keep two columns. Column one is the guaranteed number minus the drop-off this house actually sees, not the drop-off a hotel textbook quotes. Column two is residual walk-in and booked restaurant covers on the same afternoon, taken from the same Saturday last year if the diary matches, or from the nearest comparable Saturday if it does not.
The briefing on the wall should show both numbers in the same handwriting. Chefs ignore a separate events spreadsheet that lives in the GM's email.
Send the function menus with allergen notes if you have them. We do not rewrite those menus. We only stop them from silently eating the restaurant's protein order.