By Marcus Gregs

‘Yule’ be sorry if you and your team haven’t done sufficient planning and prep for the F&B festivities

Eid Al Adha, Christmas, New Year — the celebration season is unequivocally upon us.

By this stage, the promotions for your festive F&B offerings should be in the hands of your sales team, so they can get on with filling not only your stockings but also the banquet rooms and outlets.

The decorations should also be going up, for those who go in for that sort of thing.

Here in the Middle East, there is a large community who do celebrate Christmas — but it’s nowhere near as hectic as other countries I have worked in.

For example, the Sydney Hilton banqueting department dubbed December ‘The Silly Season’, because in Australia this is the month when all the offices hold their annual parties and when schools finish for the year with their graduation balls.

So the banqueting team would pump out a carvery lunch for 500, along with 1000 covers plated every day, for the entire month leading up to Christmas.

The planning for this month started in August for the sales team — and by September, every function room would be full.

By November 1, the kitchen had placed a pre-order for 40,000kg of whole turkey, the butcher had planned how much stuffing he’d need and the sauce chef had started making gravy and freezing it, so as to keep up with the demand in December (when close to 3000 litres of gravy would be consumed!)

But the section all the sous chefs had to help in November was the pastry section. The amount of time, ingredients and space that 34,000 individual and 3000 large Christmas puddings take up is amazing.

It took nine senior chefs four days, working 12 hours a day, to make all these puddings. (Don’t worry — the pastry chef bought quite a few beverages to thank us!)

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All this comes down to planning and knowing the limitations of your staff and equipment. The more organised you are, the more confident you can be that, no matter what last-minute problems are thrown at you, they can be dealt with.

The best example of this I can give (although not the nicest) is also from the Sydney Hilton, when I was a sous chef there.

I was in bed on the morning of December 24 when my phone rang: it was the junior sous chef calling to say that he had just found the head chef in the office, having a (fourth) heart attack.

By the time I got to the hotel, the ambulance was pulling away; the chef had survived, but it was a close thing.

I now had to deal with 100 very upset kitchen team members, over half of whom had worked with the chef for more than 20 years. The problem was that within 36 hours, 2500 people would be sitting down to Christmas lunch.

I was in charge of all the outlets, comprising 1500 covers; usually the chef took the ballroom with 1000 covers in one hit — but now I had to do the ballroom as well…

If we had not been so organised, the whole service would have fallen to bits; as it was, the day went totally smoothly, as the nine of us sous chefs rearranged ourselves to compensate. (And don’t worry — 10 years on, the head chef is alive and well and fully enjoying his retirement.)

So at the next Christmas party or festive lunch you attend, bear in mind how much pre-planning, organising and work has gone into your meal by those behind the scenes.

On second thoughts, don’t worry — just eat, drink, be merry and enjoy your food: it’s our pleasure to make it for you.

Ho ho ho and Merry Christmas!