Catering Editing and Proofreading Services

Catering is executed once, at a fixed time, for a number of people that was agreed weeks earlier and has changed twice since. There is no second service. Everything that goes wrong on the day — the vegan meals that were not counted, the timing that clashed with the speeches, the room that was not set as expected, the invoice that arrived larger than the quote — traces back to a document written before anyone was in the room, and to whether it recorded what was actually agreed.

We edit what caterers, event caterers and hospitality operators produce — proposals and quotations, function and banquet event orders, menu descriptions and tasting notes for clients, dietary requirement and allergen documentation, timing schedules and service running orders, staffing plans and briefing notes, room set and equipment specifications, terms and conditions including deposits and cancellation, final numbers and guarantee provisions, corkage, supplier and external vendor terms, kitchen and food safety documentation, invoice and reconciliation documentation, and post-event reporting and feedback. Our editors work on the document the chef, the manager and the client all read.

The function sheet is the single document the whole event runs from, and it fails by recording the food and not the sequence. Kitchen, front of house, the venue and the client each hold a different picture of the day, and the reconciliation happens at 6pm when the speeches overrun. We write these so timings run as a sequence with the trigger for each step — canapés from 18:30, dinner service begins when the client's contact gives the nod, no later than 19:45, speeches after the main and before dessert, dessert therefore held; so dietary requirements are recorded by name and seat rather than as a count, because a number tells a server how many and not who; so the final numbers deadline and the guarantee are stated with what the client pays if the number falls afterwards; so everything external is listed with who is responsible — the cake, the band's meals, the venue's linen, the client's own wine and its corkage; and so the person who decides on the day is named. A function sheet written this way is read by four teams and produces one event.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client events, pricing and supplier terms. We are editors rather than caterers, food safety or allergen advisers, and we offer no view on food safety, allergen management or any operational decision. What we can do is make the documents precise enough that everyone is running the same event.