A serving line moves about eighty guests in twenty minutes. Four hundred guests on one line is an hour and forty minutes of queue.
Ask somebody about a wedding they went to six months ago and they will remember two things: whether the food was good and whether they had to stand in a queue for it. Everything else fades. The second of those is pure arithmetic and it is almost never done.
A single buffet line, well laid out, with the plates at one end and no bottleneck at the rice, serves about eighty guests in twenty minutes. That is a real figure from watching it happen a hundred and eighty times, not an estimate. So a hundred and sixty guests on one line is forty minutes, which is tolerable. Four hundred guests on one line is an hour and forty minutes, and the people at the back gave up at minute fifty.
Four hundred guests need two lines, and if the functions are separate then each side needs two of its own. A tea and hedhikaa table has to be somewhere else entirely, because the people browsing it are stationary and they will block a serving line if you put them beside it.
Three layout mistakes we see constantly. Plates at the wrong end, so guests walk the line backwards. A single rice station in the middle, which is where every queue in this country actually jams, so put rice at both ends. And a line against a wall, which halves its speed, because guests can only approach from one side.
The other half of this is the caterer's own needs, which are discovered on the night far too often. They want the lane for a lorry at a specific hour, a shaded place to hold hot food, water, bins and a route to the tables that does not cross the guests. Four things, all of them easy, all of them impossible to arrange at seven o'clock in a full courtyard. We agree them at the venue visit and write them into the schedule with times against them.
One last number. Plan on about seventy per cent of guests eating at an evening wedding with dinner and nearly all of them at an afternoon function with tea. Ordering for the full list at an evening event is how families end up giving away forty portions, and ordering for seventy per cent at an afternoon one is how they run out.
