Choosing the food and alcohol for your event can be a challenge, but an event planner can help you make the right choices.
“We ask leading questions,” says Craig Decker, sales and marketing director at Made From Scratch, a catering and event planning firm. “What are your expectations? What kind of concept have you come up with? If someone says, ‘I see us having hamburgers and hotdogs in the backyard and having something like wagons and such with a Western theme,’ that makes it easy for us to understand that they want a very inexpensive, very casual environment, versus the client who’s saying, ‘I want seafood items.’
“That leads us to a different type of customer, with higher expectations and higher associated costs.”
Once you determine the theme and food, it’s time to consider beverages. Even if you don’t know what your guests will drink, the caterer might.
“We have a database where I can punch in how many people you have, how many hours long your party’s going to be, and I can tell you within five minutes how many bottles of vodka you’ll go through, how many bottles of wine, how many red, how many white, how many Budweisers … I can tell you pretty much down to the glass exactly what the average party will consume at any event,” says Decker, who is a co-creator of the best-selling wine Arbor Mist.
Decker, who appears on the Columbus TV show Cooking with Jonathan, says the age of the guests gives him a good idea of what to serve. “If they’re all 50 to 60 years old, then … they’re going to be drinking a lot of brown liquor,” he says. “If I’ve got a lot of 30- to 40-year-olds, they’re going to gravitate toward Heineken and wine, versus someone on the younger side, who is probably going to gravitate toward beer.”
The rule of thumb is one drink per person per hour. Decker says it’s usually more economical to have a host bar, paying one price per head with unlimited consumption, vs. paying per drink.
And if you want to hold the event at your business, a caterer can legally serve alcohol there. “As long as your party is not open to the public, it’s private invitation and you’re not charging anything to attend — which means you can’t charge for books, an entrance fee or a donation. Because when you charge to come to that event, the law says you are charging for the alcohol that’s contained in the event, even though you’re giving it away. You can give alcohol away all day long, but the minute you start charging is the minute you start having problems.” HOW TO REACH: Made From Scratch, (614) 873-3344
