Catering
Catering is the highest-stakes food purchase most people ever make. A bad dinner is one bad evening; bad catering is fifty guests remembering your event for the wrong reason. Having catered office launches, weddings and full-house private events from our Kampong Gelam kitchen, here is the guide we wish every customer read before calling anyone — including us.
First, decide the format before you compare prices, because formats aren't comparable. Drop-off buffet (food delivered in trays, you serve) is cheapest and suits offices. Full-service buffet (staff, chafing dishes, setup, teardown) is the wedding standard. Live stations (a chef grilling or carving on-site) cost the most and are the only format guests actually talk about afterwards. Get quotes within one format or the numbers are meaningless.
Pricing reality in Singapore's catering market: basic drop-off buffets start around fifteen to twenty dollars a head. Proper full-service buffets run twenty-five to forty-five. Premium or live-station setups go fifty and beyond. Anyone quoting dramatically below these bands is cutting something — portion size, dish count, or staff. Ask exactly what the per-head price includes: delivery, setup, serviceware, teardown, and the seven percent service charge-plus-GST question that doubles many a final invoice.
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Menu planning follows one rule: cook for the crowd you have, not the crowd you wish you had. Corporate lunches want recognisable food in volume — grilled chicken, rice, salads, nothing challenging. Family events want generosity and spectacle — whole platters, mixed grills, a dessert table. Mixed crowds want a spine of safe dishes with two or three signatures for the adventurous. A Turkish menu handles this unusually well: rice and grilled meats for the cautious, meze and kunefe for the curious, and nothing on the table that needs interrogating.
On the kitchen itself, ask two questions. One: is everything cooked fresh in their own kitchen, or bought in and reheated? Two: is the menu you are getting the same food the restaurant serves, or a cut-down catering version? A good caterer answers plainly and proudly.
Lead times that actually work: small drop-off orders, three to five days. Full-service buffets, two weeks minimum. Weddings and anything above a hundred guests, four to six weeks — longer in Ramadan and the December season, when every kitchen in Singapore is booked out. A deposit is normal and protects you as much as them; get the final guest count deadline in writing, because that number decides everything.
Taste before you book. Any caterer confident in their food will arrange a tasting for a large event, sometimes free, sometimes deducted from the final bill. If they won't, or can't, you've learned the most important thing about them early and cheaply.
Our own catering arm runs everything from twenty-person office drops to full private buyouts of the restaurant. The pitch is simple: charcoal-grilled meats and Turkish breads travel well, meze holds beautifully on a buffet, and kunefe made on-site is the live station people photograph. But use this guide with whoever you shortlist. An informed customer gets better catering from everyone.
Everything we write about, we cook daily — 10:00am to 1:00am at 257 Beach Road, Kampong Gelam. Charcoal-fired, family-owned, five minutes from Bugis MRT.