My part time work, whilst studying in Manchester is also in Events. I work for an Event Management and Catering company based in both Manchester and London. Payal Manchester during busy periods can hold up to two weddings per weekend, catering from fifty people to eight hundred. My work includes, serving the customers, setting up for the event, ensuring the smooth running of the wedding and to keep all customers happy helping them with anything I can.
This work is particularly helpful in helping me to understand operations in events by allowing me to witness the logistics from start to finish on the day also enabling me to see the success? and the failures of them. Therefore this blog will be on Catering, due to my various past experience on the subject.
Catering, especially for weddings can be the most important element in operations, Tum (2012) explains just how critical catering is and why. It can cost up to 50% of the overall wedding fee. Everything in a wedding is based around the meal, the decorations suiting the theme all placed where the guests can view them from their table. The quality and presentation of a guests meal at a wedding can enhance or completely ruin the event experience. Pictures below of a setting for a wedding that I once worked at.
Payal specialise in Indian weddings therefore their dishes are very different to ?British? weddings. Most of the weddings include, canopies to begin with (kebabs, spicy potato etc) followed with a fresh fruit starter being served to the guests tables. Followed with five or six Indian curry dishes (serve yourself), accompanied with rice and salads etc. This is then finished with a plated desert normally consisting of fruit or chocolate with an Indian twist to enhance the theming.
The operations in serving the food, Payal normally pair two waitress? up and give them two or three tables. Normally the tables hold up to ten people each therefore this operation can enhance the personal and efficient service of the food. For drinks, main courses and clearing we stick to our own tables to make sure everyone is being looked after quickly.
(Bowdin, 2010: p507-508) explains how staffing numbers work for different services, also accompanying Payal?s operation practices.
?At a cooperate function or formal dinner a ratio of 1:10 is appropriate.. Staffing numbers will be varied depending on the style of service being adopted.?
As well as agreeing with how Payal run their catering operations Drummond et al (2004) also explains if there is complex catering needs the operations will need to adapt to it. This being very much related to the ?snaking? operation that we perform whilst serving.
Especially when there is a large amount of people to be served, for plated meals like starters or deserts sometimes if its reasonably practicable we ?snake? the room.
?Snaking? service means to all serve from one end of the room to another to make sure each sides of the room are being served at the same time and quickly.
Graham (2001) looks at the other side of catering, drinks. For beverages served at the wedding, Payal needs the venue to hold a license to enable for alcoholic drinks to be served legally. Graham stresses the importance of the licences and also outlines problems that arise from alcohol being served like, noise and behaviour problems.
Although, due to many of the weddings Payal caters and manages being Indian, a lot of guests do not drink alcohol and some weddings have a complete ban on it, making the operation delivering the drinks much easier for the company.
My last analysis on operations in catering is the wastage, due to the high numbers of guests this only produces high numbers of wastage at the end of the night. The staff are all fed but due to food hygiene and safety regulations the food at the end of the night has to be binned. The food is cooked on site and also kept warm therefore it would be illegal to give away or sold because if the food was to be heated up again it would be dangerous. This all in all is one of my most hated aspects of the catering industry and its upsetting to see how much food goes to waste. Payal?s operation on such is to only cook for the amount of people and to try and use up as much left over food as possible at the end of the night. Sometimes good wastage is minimum but I have taken a photo which is below my blog showing just how much waste can be left after a big wedding.
References
Tum, J., & Norton, P. (2012). Management of event operations. Routledge.
Bowdin, G., Allen, J., Harris, R., McDonnell, I., O?Toole, W.(2010). Events management. Event operations. Butterworth-Heinemann. Pp 507-509
Drummond, S., and Anderson, H. (2004). Service quality and managing your people. Butterworth-Heinemann
Like this:
Be the first to like this.
Source: http://oliviafield.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/catering/
noaa Jessica Ridgeway jessica biel ipad mini Kevin Krim Autumn Pasquale ann coulter
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.