Being naturally short on resources due to our 'small business' nature, it was indeed quite a challenge to serve up a breakfast, lunch and tea consecutively for 130 pax with barely more than 5 kitchen crew, mostly which are inexperienced and drawn out from the 'fresh meat' squad.
Anyways, before running into the details, photos of the event (our apologies for the blurry shots as we do not have proper shooting equipment):
The good news: They loved the food! For any cook, one could not delight more in their guests liking and finishing their food. At every meal, nearly everything was finished despite our efforts in doubling the portions even for the second day.
A big thanks to all the crew who served and prepared the food during this time. We are proud to announce that there was no chef at the helm of the whole event, but rather a Computer Science graduate - I'm not sure, but I'm about as baffled as you are to how it all worked out :D
The kitchen crew got up as early as 4a.m. to begin ingredient preparations and each meal was allocated between 4-6 hours of preparation. With 5 crew, that equates to one crew serving 6.5 guests per hour. Not very heavy at first sight, but if we were to break it down, it equates to serving 1 guest every 10 minutes with all courses (usually 4-5 courses per meal) inclusive of preparation time and everything. Thus, our estimation was just on time on nearly all accounts, minus one meal where the organizers wanted their meal earlier - So the kitchen simply told them if they were to serve earlier than agreed upon, there would be less food - literally :D
The biggest surprise for the whole event was actually the lack of experience that most of the crew 'had'. All our kitchen assistants (or at least 75%) were completely new to our kitchen, and some had never even touched a 'kuali' in their lives. Thankfully, we didn't ask the fresh meat to go 'goreng nasi' LOL.
With the tiny kitchen churning out food for double its normal capacity, we naturally ended up utilizing most of the space in the cafe - converted into a mobile mass production centre for 3 days. Due to limited storage, we had to acquire most of the stock only the day before preparation. Thus you could probably catch an overloaded white Myvi full of vegetables, poultry, potatoes, fruits, and more running round the city at 5a.m. in the morning :P
All in all, it was great exposure and also a good benchmark to test our capacity for future events. Don't worry though, if your event requires food for 1000 pax, we would happily mobilise our kitchen to adapt to your needs (If that means occupying public space too haha).
With that, we hope to see you around at our next event! All thanks to the Ministry of Dentistry!
