Be the Caterer the Venue Hopes For: Notes on Working With Venues
When I ran restaurants, the building was mine. I knew which burner ran hot, which door stuck in the rain, where the extra chairs lived. If something broke, it was my problem and my call.
Catering turned that around. At LA'telier, almost every event happens in someone else's house: a museum, a studio, a hotel ballroom, a backyard, a warehouse with no kitchen at all. We arrive as guests, even when we're the ones feeding everyone.
That shift taught me something I wish I had understood sooner, even in my restaurant years. The people who run a space can make your night easy or impossible. How you treat them decides which one you get.
1. Walk the space before you write the menu
The best menu in the world fails in the wrong room. Before we commit to anything, we want to see where the kitchen will be, how far it is from the guests, where the power is, where the trucks unload and how long the hallway is between them.
A venue manager knows things no floor plan shows. The elevator that only fits one rack. The loading dock that closes at a certain hour. The courtyard that gets windy after sunset. I've learned to ask those questions early and to listen to the answers. Ten minutes of walking with the person who knows the building saves hours of fixing on the day.
2. The house rules are part of the job
Every venue has rules: load-in windows, open-flame limits, where you can park, what can touch the floors and walls, when the music stops. It's tempting to see them as obstacles. I see them as the venue telling you how to be invited back.
So we read them, share them with the whole team before the event, and build the plan around them. If a rule makes something hard, we ask about it openly instead of hoping nobody notices. A venue remembers the caterer who respected the space, and it remembers the one who didn't even more.
3. Make the venue team look good
On event day, the venue staff answer to their own bosses. If the night goes badly, it lands on them too. So part of our job is to make them look good.
That means being on time, being where we said we'd be, and keeping our area clean all day, not just at the end. It means one clear point of contact on our side, so the venue manager isn't chasing five different people for one answer. And it means telling them about a problem the moment we see it, not after it has grown.
When the venue team trusts you, they help you. They find the extra table, open the side door, lend you the ladder. You can't buy that. You earn it one event at a time.
4. Share the guest
The client hired us, but the guests belong to everyone in the building that night. The security team at the door, the coat check, the people who run the lights: they're all part of the guest's experience, whether they wear our uniform or not.
I like to treat them as part of the team for the night. We make sure they know the timeline. We tell them when food is about to go out so nobody gets surprised in a doorway. And we feed them, because people who work long events are often the last ones anyone thinks about. A plate and a thank-you go a long way.
5. Leave it better than you found it
The end of an event is where reputations are made, quietly. The guests are gone, the client is happy, and the team is tired. This is exactly when shortcuts happen.
We try not to take them. Trash goes where the venue wants it. Floors get checked. Anything we moved goes back. Before we leave, someone from our team walks the space with the venue manager, the same way we walked it at the start. If something got damaged, we say so right away.
It's not glamorous work. But the venue team will remember how they found their building the next morning long after they forget the menu.
6. Think in years, not nights
A single event feels like the whole world while you're inside it. But the relationship with a venue lasts much longer than one night. The same managers move between venues, talk to each other and recommend the people they like working with.
I'd rather be the caterer a venue is glad to see walk in than the one who wins one argument and never gets called back. That means being honest about what we can do, saying no when something isn't right for the space, and following up with a simple thank-you after the event.
What I carry with me
Running my own restaurants taught me to care about every detail of a room. Working in other people's rooms taught me humility. You can be excellent at food and service and still be a bad guest.
The best events happen when everyone in the building feels like they're on the same team: the client, the venue, our crew and the guests. Our job is to bring that feeling with us, set it up, take care of it all night and leave it behind when we go.
Stephane Bombet has 35 years in hospitality. He is Managing Partner of LA'telier, a catering and events company, and helps restaurant owners through The Operator Forge. More about Stephane · More writing