The food arrives at ten past twelve and the room stalls. There is a cake on the table and it is a good cake, but it needs a knife, a plate, and somebody willing to be the person who stands up and cuts it while the client watches. Nine minutes go missing. Nobody says anything about it, and nobody forgets it either.
Most corporate catering in Christchurch is chosen on flavour. In a boardroom it is judged on format. The question that matters is not whether the food is good — it is whether a person can take a piece, sit back down, and keep listening.
The portion is the unit, not the platter
Everything worth putting in front of eight people at a table has already been divided before it leaves the kitchen. A tray of mini cakes and petit fours needs no cutting. Cake slices come as quarter-slice portions, boxed for catering in sets of fifteen, so the serving decision was made days ago by someone who is not in your meeting. Mini cakes and mini desserts are one serving each, in trays of six or twelve.
It is a smaller idea than it sounds and it changes the whole afternoon. Nothing is plated, nothing is carved, no serving spoon goes missing, and there is no five minutes of hosting theatre in the middle of an agenda you were already running late on.
What the first hour needs
A nine o'clock start and an all-day workshop want savoury, and they want it warm. The artisan savouries hold up to a long morning better than pastries do: a Quiche Lorraine cut into wedges, a Stuffed Sfiha, the Cheese and Spring Onion Potato Bread. The Brazilian cheese scone is the one people go back for.
Worth knowing if you run these regularly: savouries can be supplied frozen rather than fresh, to be heated on site. For a two-day offsite, or a workshop where break time is a guess, that removes the problem of timing pickup against the agenda.
All three quiches and the Brazilian cheese scone are made with no added gluten, which quietly solves the dietary line on your registration form. Our kitchen is small and without exclusive production areas for all of our different recipes, so traces may occur, and nothing is guaranteed safe for severe coeliac disease. The No Added Gluten range goes considerably further than most people expect, and the quiches have their own story.
What the last twenty minutes needs
The close of a client meeting is where the food does actual work. A petit four is a two-bite thing — the name is French, from small oven — and it is the only format that survives a handshake. All ten of ours are made with no added gluten, same caveat as above. A tray is $60 for fifteen pieces; count three to five per guest and you have the number. There is no minimum order of twenty, and there never was.
For a table of six to sixteen, one tray and a box of slices is usually the entire answer. If the function is bigger than a boardroom, the event catering side takes it from there, and we have written about scaling desserts for a crowd before.
Count heads before you count budget
The most common mistake is over-ordering, because the portions are larger than they photograph. A one-kilogram dessert box serves four. A twenty-centimetre tart serves ten to twelve. A tray of fifteen slices will comfortably do a room of fifteen with nothing left to carry back to the fridge. Write the number of chairs on a sticky note and order to that.
If the food is going out rather than staying in, the pre-configured corporate gift boxes are built to land inside the $75 to $100 per-head band that most expense policies allow, with a handwritten note in every one and consolidated GST invoicing behind it. Cafes and restaurants ordering cabinet stock go through the wholesale side instead.
Taste it before you sign off on it
You can buy single slices in the cabinet any day we are open, which is the cheapest way to audition a flavour before committing a client lunch to it. Bring the person whose call it actually is — the partner hosting, the manager who signs the invoice. A choice two people made over a table at The Welder does not get re-litigated at eleven the next morning. The slice range is the shortcut.
Ordering, and the two-day question
Most things need two days. Larger desserts need three, and petit fours need a full week, so a Friday client lunch is a Monday decision. Everything is made to order, and the date picker at checkout only offers dates the kitchen can genuinely meet for what is in your cart, which means you cannot accidentally promise your CEO something that will not exist. The catering boxes page lays out every format.
Collection is from the patisserie inside The Welder at 20–26 Welles Street, seven minutes' walk south of the Bus Interchange, parking across the road and behind the building. Open ten to six Tuesday to Friday, ten to three Saturday, closed Sundays and Mondays. Corporate is the one case where delivery is worth raising on enquiry: for larger or repeating orders Dhi will look at dropping them off himself. Ask rather than assume.
