Behind the Scenes at a Hotel Catered Event

Most of you know by now that I work in sales (among other things) at a hotel. I do large room blocks and banquets. I like the banquet sales part of the job, but find the rooms department pretty boring.

This morning we hosted a breakfast for about 170 faculty & honor graduates from our local college.

I thought it might be interesting to some of you to see what goes on behind the scenes.


It takes a lot of carafes of water and quite a few people to fill them for 170 guests.


We always put a slice of lemon in our water.

Today the servers rolled the silverware in the red napkin. It's not something we usually do, but breakfast is informal and I actually think it looked quite nice with the preset orange juice.




No, the chef isn't trying to gas himself, although I expect he's thought about it many times during some stressful banquets! He's heating all the plates because a hot meal should be served on a warm plate.

See the orange arrow? It's pointing to my part of this whole scenario. That's the function sheet I do so the chef knows what to cook, what time to serve, and any other pertinent details. I distribute these sheets to every department (5 of them) so everyone knows what needs to be done. If the food tastes awful, it's his fault. If sausage is served instead of bacon, then it's most likely my fault because I didn't get it right on the sheet. (That would not be a good thing!)

Look at all this fruit! There were two of these containers full...that's a lot of melon to cut into bite-sized pieces.
Everyone is getting lined up to "plate" the meal. It's just like an assembly line when everyone gets in place. I think we whipped out 170 plates of food in less than 15 minutes.


Here I am getting my food gloves on. Once they were on I couldn't take pics because I would contaminate the gloves. There was no time for picture taking anyway.

Everybody has one specific item to put on the plate. My job was to put the fruit on
The guy before me put the kale on.
The plates were pretty colorful -- cinnamon French toast, sausage and fruit.

How would you like to be this guy? He's the person who has to do all the dishes when the meal is finished.

Every department did their job well and the event went off without a problem.
That's the way we all like it to go!

This was a different meeting. I thought it was cute with these little beanie dogs at each place setting.

So this was a tiny glimpse into my work day. It was not a particularly busy day, but it went by fast as they all do. It was even fun.

I really can't complain because I do have a pretty good job (just don't tell the big boss I like it!).