The two hardest catering jobs are the very large and the very small, and they are hard for opposite reasons. Everything in between is comparatively forgiving.
At two hundred, the constraint is heat, not cooking. Almost any kitchen can cook the food. The question is whether it can be held at temperature, transported, set up and served before it stops being what it was. Menus for large rooms are chosen for how they survive the ninety minutes after they leave the pass, which is why the buffet menu is not the plated menu in a larger tray.
Large rooms also want fewer dishes, not more. A long menu at scale means smaller batches of each thing, more holding, more runs, and a queue that stalls while people deliberate. Fewer dishes cooked properly beats a wider spread cooked at the edge of what the kit allows.
At eight, the constraint is that there is nowhere to hide. Every plate is looked at. Nothing is lost in the middle of a table. The margin for a dish that is merely fine disappears, and the cooking has to be better than it does for two hundred, not worse.
Small events buy attention; large events buy logistics. That is genuinely what the money is doing in each case, and knowing which one you are buying makes the quotes legible. An intimate dinner is expensive per head because of the labour in the detail. A large event is expensive because of everything that is not food — transport, equipment, staff, time on site.
Tell us the headcount and the room at the enquiry, not the menu you have in mind. The number and the space decide more than the dishes do.
