There is something about fall that makes us want to gather - to watch a game, around a table, or for a special event. Maybe it’s the first chilly morning after yet another summer of breaking heat records, or the return of dishes that arrive caramelized, braised, and comforting. 

I am never one to wish away a season, as I try to find little joys throughout the year. But I can never help getting a little extra excited for fall. In my opinion, fall offers the best of colors, comfort fashion, and of course great food and great events.

The invitation says 5:30pm to 8:30pm. Three hours. That's the part the guest experiences.

Everything else, the part that actually makes those three hours work, happens in a building and kitchen days before. 

Sales

A custom menu: passed hors d'oeuvres to open, a stationed spread to keep people moving, a grazing table anchoring the room, small plates and sliders throughout the night, dessert to close it out. Two bars, both fully stocked, both staffed. Eighty guests. Sales has already walked the client through the shape of the evening, priced it, confirmed the headcount, and locked the menu. Now it's operations' responsibility, and operations starts counting backward from 5:30pm.

Lancaster County runs on people who show up. Manufacturing floors, family farms, hospital wings, office parks off Route 30. None of it moves without the people inside it. We feed those people. Not as an event. As a relationship.

That's what business lunch catering actually is, once you strip away the language of vendors and proposals. It's showing up for the same company over and over, in whatever form that day requires, until they stop thinking of you as a caterer and start thinking of you as the person who feeds their team.

Catering is not a job you explain to someone in a single sentence. People hear the word and they picture passed trays and chafing dishes and stuffy hotel ballrooms with buffets. That's one version of it. A particular version. The larger version is something different: it is the act of going somewhere, making it feel like somewhere, and feeding people well while you're there. It is hospitality in the most literal sense of the word. You are in service. That is the whole point.