Plan your catering kit by menu alone and you can end up with three ovens and nowhere to keep the food hot. Plan by service stage instead: prep, cook, hold, serve, chill and clear down. Each stage needs its own equipment, power supply and floor space.
Plan your catering kit by menu alone and you can end up with three ovens and nowhere to keep the food hot. Plan by service stage instead: prep, cook, hold, serve, chill and clear down. Each stage needs its own equipment, power supply and floor space.
Write down the time each course leaves the kitchen, then work backwards. A wedding breakfast for 120 served at 3pm might need the ovens on from noon, hot holding running from 2pm and desserts plated in a fridge by 4pm. From that timeline you can work out how much kit you need running at the same moment, and how much power it draws at the busiest point.
Give your team a clean, stable surface away from the cooking line. An 1800mm stainless steel prep table gives two chefs room to work side by side. Where the venue has no sink near the catering area, add a mobile handwash station. It holds 25 litres of water, gives about 80 washes per refill and heats the water from a standard 13A socket.
See our food prep equipment for boards, gastronorm pans and storage.
Choose cooking kit by the power and gas the venue can supply.
Ask the venue before you order gas appliances, as some indoor venues don't allow LPG inside the building. Keep a fire blanket and the right extinguisher next to the fryer; you will find both in our catering safety equipment range. For the full cooking range, see cooking equipment hire.
Hot holding lets your chefs cook ahead and serve every table at once. Size it by the number of gastronorm trays you need to keep hot at the same time.
Both hot cupboards weigh 90kg or more. Our drivers deliver to the ground floor only, so tell us about any steps between the van and the kitchen when you book.
For a buffet, plan one full-size chafing dish for each hot dish on the menu. Each one takes a standard 1/1 gastronorm pan. For a large guest list, set up a double-sided buffet with a second dish of each item so two queues move at the same pace. Order chafing fuel with the dishes from our catering accessories.
A 20-litre water boiler covers tea and coffee and runs from a standard socket. Add plates, cups and glasses from our crockery hire and glassware hire ranges.
Keep food and drink in separate fridges. Bar staff open a drinks fridge all evening, and each opening lets warm air reach anything else on the shelves.
Switch each fridge on as soon as you have it in position, and give it a few hours to reach temperature before you load it. Our fridge and freezer hire page lists the full range.
Plan the end of service with the same care as the start. Let ovens and hot cupboards cool before anyone moves them, and drain the fryer through its valve once the oil has cooled. Pack crockery and glassware back into the crates they arrived in, ready for collection at the ground-floor drop point.
Our delivery access checklist covers the delivery side in more detail, and the event catering equipment checklist helps you make sure nothing is missing from the order.
For one-off events and seasonal pop-ups, hiring saves you the storage, servicing and electrical testing that owned equipment needs between events. If you run the same kit every week of the year, buying will often work out cheaper over time.
Browse the full range on our catering equipment hire page. We deliver from 11 depots to venues across England and Wales.
Choose from our vast range of catering hire, furniture hire and exhibition hire products. Select from the categories listed below or use our great search function above.
