Meeting catering - a choice of your favorite restaurants

When planning an corporate or office meeting, and looking at meeting catering options, there's no need to go all out and follow the steps for a typical catering event.  While you can do all the things necessary when looking for an event catering company for your meeting catering needs (corporate, conference, or otherwise), you don't really have to. In general (and depending on your meeting size), when you're planning on meeting catering, you can forget about interviewing each potential caterer, working hard on a catering menu, coming up with a specific catering theme, etc. Probably the best recommendation is to straight to your favorite restaurant or lunch hangout and ask if the company does meeting catering. Most well-established restaurants do, and they know exactly what to do.

You still might need to interview a few meeting catering companies, but you can do this with a quick phone call to check catering prices, deals, packages, etc. There's no real need to check out the work of the meeting catering company at a specific event - as is usually the suggestion when planning bigger catered events like weddings or conferences, or something at an event venue.  At the most basic level, the most you need to know about a meeting catering company, is if you (and the meeting participants!) will like the food they offer.

A few cursory phone calls probably will need to be placed, and if you have a meeting catering budget you'll need to find which catering prices are most likely to fit into your price range. You'll need to figure out what dishes feed how many people, and how many entrees/sandwiches/meals you'll need to order. Most caterers and corporate catering companies have standard fare that they offer for catered events, and they'll be able to help you decide on what types of food to order and how much.

Business Meeting catering typically differs from most other types of event catering in that - unless you're planning a large meeting, or have some sort of distinguished visitors and need to make it more formal - you won't utilize the actual catering staff (and many meeting catering companies don't even offer this option). You simply need to decide what restaurant you'll be getting your food from, and what you want, and the venue will make and deliver specific platters, dishes, etc to meet your meeting catering requirements. 

One thing you may need to take into consideration is the type of serving ware will be provided by the meeting catering company with the meal. Often meeting catering serve ware means the food is on plastic platters or in aluminum containers with plastic silverware and serving utensils.  For most meetings this type of ware will suit just fine. But, if you do happen to be planning one of those "distinguished visitors'" meetings and you're looking for an upscale event, you may want to plan ahead and stock up on some silverware, serving platter, plates and accoutrements of your own.

But, the bottom line is, when planning for a basic meeting as a catered event you don't need to know much or do much in the way of meeting catering - most companies or restaurants will be able to take care of the important things for you.