What a per-head price is actually made of

Take a plated three-course meal. The raw food cost is a modest fraction of the figure, and the rest is people and equipment: chefs on site for a full day, waiting staff at a ratio the service style demands, kitchen porters, hire of crockery, glassware, cutlery and linen, transport, and the hours before and after when nobody is eating but everybody is being paid.

That is the whole reason the gap between a buffet and a plated meal is wider than the menus suggest. A buffet is served by fewer people in less time. A plated meal for a hundred and twenty needs enough hands to get a hundred and twenty hot plates onto tables inside a few minutes, and that number of hands is the cost.

The ratios that drive the number

As a working guide, plated service runs at roughly one server to eight or ten guests, family-style sharing at one to twelve to fifteen, and a buffet at one to twenty-five or thirty, because the guests do the carrying. Canapés are the outlier: they look light and they are labour-heavy, because every item is individually assembled and then walked around a room for an hour.

Read a quotation with those ratios in mind and it stops being mysterious. If one caterer is materially cheaper at the same service style, the usual explanation is fewer staff or shorter hours, and both show up on the day rather than on the page.

What sits outside the per-head figure, almost always

Ask about each of these by name. VAT, which is stated inconsistently across the trade and moves a total by a fifth. Staff hours beyond a stated finish time. Hire of anything the venue does not own. Cake cutting and plating. Supplier meals for the photographer, the band and anyone else working. Evening food, which is a second service and is priced as one. Corkage or a drinks package. Service charge. Delivery and, for a temporary kitchen, the equipment to build one.

None of these are hidden. They are simply not in the number that gets compared, and a caterer who lists them unprompted is usually the one who has quoted honestly.

Where couples reliably overspend

Four patterns, in order of how much they cost.

Too many courses. A five-course meal takes an extra hour of the day and adds staff hours, and the fourth and fifth courses are the ones that come back barely touched. Three good courses beat five modest ones on every measure including how much people eat.

Canapés at scale. They read as a small addition and they are among the most labour-intensive things a kitchen produces. Fewer varieties, in greater quantity, costs materially less and is more satisfying to eat.

Evening food ordered as a second meal. Guests who ate at four are not hungry at nine, they are drunk at nine. Something salty, hot and simple does the job that a second buffet is bought to do.

Drink bought by the head rather than by the bottle. Unlimited packages are priced for the heaviest plausible consumption. Working out what your guest list actually drinks is usually cheaper, and it is always more honest.

The one thing worth spending on

If there is money to move, move it to service rather than to menu. A well-fed room that was served promptly, at the right temperature, with drinks that never ran out, is remembered as excellent catering regardless of what was on the plate. A more expensive menu served slowly, cold, by too few people, is remembered as bad catering.

That is the whole trade in one sentence, and it is why the staffing line in a quotation deserves more attention than the menu does.

Dietary requirements, done properly

Allergies are a safety matter and not a preference, and the standard to hold a caterer to is specific: allergen information in writing for every dish, separated preparation for the fourteen named allergens, a named person on the day who knows which plate goes where, and no reliance on the guest to identify their own meal in a dark room.

Vegetarian and vegan guests deserve better than a plated afterthought, and the practical answer is to make one of the main dishes genuinely plant-based rather than to run a separate parallel menu. It costs less, it eats better and it removes the problem entirely.

Reading a quotation against another one

Ask for both to be re-quoted on the same specification: same guest count, same service style, same finish time, VAT shown, hire itemised, staff numbers stated, evening food included or excluded consistently. Almost no two caterers quote the same shape unprompted, and the comparison is meaningless until they do.

Then ask one question that tells you a great deal: how many staff will be on site, and until what time. The answer separates the quotations more reliably than the menus do.