Rethinking The Banquet Menu

Dont look for grass-fed tenderloin of beef, locally grown spring vegetables and a salad of microgreens for lunch or dinner at business conventions. Those gatherings got the name rubber chicken circuit for a reason.

Some event planners are offering desserts or snacks instead of full meals.

Event planners are feeling squeezed as they try to balance the rising costs of food and labor with the increasingly sophisticated palates of the crowds they feed. Forced to choose, some are going with small-plate receptions instead of sit-down meals or buffets, replacing mass quantities with culinary theater or even skipping meals altogether.

And those who are lucky enough to get a meal, be forewarned: rubber chicken rules.

Its the cheapest thing on the menu, said Margie John. After one of the planners dropped out, she and her husband, David John, an associate professor of computer science at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., found themselves planning the menu for the Association of Computing Machinery Southeast conference, to be held later this month in Winston-Salem.

Salmon caught her eye, but she knew that some people would not eat fish. The buffet option, with two entrees at $36 a person or three entrees at $41 a person, far exceeded the $25 price that conference organizers had set for a dinner. So, a few weeks from opening day on March 23, they were planning to read the contract to see whether they could bring in outside food and skip doughnuts at $26 a dozen.

Price is often a deciding factor in the food choices of other groups as well. For insurance conferences, Catherine J. Weatherford, the chief executive of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, now chooses lighter fare for lunches — soups, salads, sandwiches and fruit — instead of the standard meat-carbohydrate-vegetable meal.

Ms. Weatherford has another motivation for offering nibbles instead of hearty meals. She has found that a buffet of heavy Italian dishes like lasagna, eggplant parmigiana and garlic bread promote napping during slide presentations, as well as the distracting desire for a breath mint.

The Lunar and Planetary Science conference beginning Monday provides neither lunch nor an evening buffet, though one reception will feature shrimp and vegetable pasta salad, chicken salad sandwiches on croissants, a hot spinach artichoke dip with pita bread, and raw and pickled vegetables, along with beer and wine. There will also be a smaller event with beer and cheeses and crackers.

Weve upgraded from barbecue, says Mary Cloud, who oversees conference logistics at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, which is host of the event on the outskirts of Houston. In previous years, she said, organizers resorted to selling meal tickets so that they could offer upscale dishes like pecan-crusted red snapper, along with salads and cheeses.

At the February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco, myriad choices were available at a reception — dim sum to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Italian delicacies to highlight the citys North Beach area, spanakopita, beef Wellington — but the scientists were on their own for all other meals. They had to find their own coffee, too, unless a sponsor of a particular session was willing to spend $90 a gallon, said Leslie Warrick, a manager of meeting operations for the group. A gallon of coffee will serve about 20 people, she said. With about six thousand attendees, that would blow my budget.

Coffee aside, the associations menu had some flair, with its regional specialties, seasonal vegetables, ethnic accents and what Ms. Warrick calls action stations, where food is prepared in front of the diners.

Live cooking stations add a lot more excitement to the meal, says Gerard Viverito, a caterer and an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. They started off years ago with omelet stations, or stir-fry stations, or sushi stations.

Now, the sandwich station has become popular, with a chef standing by to build a custom panini — and to answer questions, says Brett Lewis, a corporate executive chef for Centerplate, an event caterer based in Spartanburg, S.C. People want to get to know the guy in the white coat, the person behind the scenes, he said. Theyre the knowledgeable people.

Marian Bossard, vice president for meetings and events at the Toy Industry Association, said that Centerplates experienced chefs were a hit at the groups toy fair last month at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, where Centerplate is the exclusive caterer.

They create their own menus; its very turnkey for us, said Ms. Bossard, who hired Centerplate to provide food for 70 in the executive dining room at the Javits Convention Center. She says that some of the exhibitors used Centerplates online menu-planning service, www.ezplanit.com.

For an international conference of insurance regulators planned for October in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the options will go beyond surf and turf, to sushi and other Asian fare, Ms. Weatherford says.

Event planners are faced with a particular challenge when food is not merely the fuel for a conference but also the main event. That was the case when a group of chefs assembled in Pittsburgh last weekend to participate in the Northeast Regional Conference of the American Culinary Federation.

We do a lot of demos and hands-on classes, from pastry to sugar work, says Mark Wright, a vice president of the group. But dinners and breaks and lunches and breakfasts are the most important. And standards are high: The chef is on the spot. He has to put on the game face and get out there.

There were certainly dishes on the menu that sounded worthy of an upscale restaurant — mushroom brie bisque, romaine hearts with grilled shrimp and feta cheese vinaigrette, peppered pork medallions with an apple-onion confit, Wisconsin cheeses with nuts and dried fruit.

But even the chefs cannot escape standard conference fare, for there on the listing, dressed up with a blend of crab meat and a lobster reduction, was a breast of chicken.

Yes, theres chicken, Mr. Wright said. But I can tell you it wont be rubber.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?