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If you're planning to have a big barbecue, as is increasingly common for sporting events, wedding anniversaries and graduation parties, you need to choose your caterer early.
- Ask family and friends to recommend a barbecue caterer, or if you have attended a wonderful barbecue, find out who catered it. Although in the USA professionally catered barbecues are commonplace, here you'll find only a few organisers who have real experience and when you combine the risks of food poisoning, burns and delayed meals which are the most likely outcomes of a badly catered barbecue, you'll see it's worth paying a little more for somebody who has both experience and understanding of the issues.
- Arrange to meet prospective caterers on site, this allows you to get a sense of whether the caterer's taste and personality match your own and gives them a chance to assess the location so that they can give you a quotation that's based on the facts. You need to provide them with this information: approximate guest count, date and time, catering budget and food preferences (eg number of vegetarians, muslims, vegans etc who might have special dietary requirements).
- Make sure you ask each caterer for references and ring the people they give you details of. You might want to ask for a list of events they've catered recently and call some of the people they don't give you the numbers for - after all, they're going to use the people they know they've done the best job for as references, so if you have doubts, explore how other clients feel too.
- Check if the caterer will attend your event - all too often, the person you meet will delegate the task to somebody more junior.
- Potential caterers will put together proposed menus and estimates of cost. Discuss menu changes to ensure everything meets your personal preferences.
- After selecting a caterer, meet with them again to nail down details and sign a contract. Generally, a fifty percent deposit is required with the reservation and the balance due just before the event.
Barbecue professional photograph by Daniel Dainty, used under a creative commons attribution licence.
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