People ask us how far ahead to book. Far fewer ask what time on the day we should actually start serving, and it is the question that makes more difference to how the evening feels.
Open the dessert bar once dinner has cleared and the room has started moving again — usually around the first dance. Not at the start, and not at the very end.
If the machine opens while dinner is being served, it competes with dinner. People drift over, fill up, and then push a plate around for half an hour. The catering you paid for goes back to the kitchen barely touched, and the dessert that was supposed to be a moment becomes a snack nobody noticed.
The opposite failure, and more common. The bar opens at nine, a third of your guests have already gone home, and you have paid per head for people who were in the car park.
Dessert lands best in the stretch between dinner finishing and the room properly loosening up — when people are out of their seats, talking, and looking for a reason to wander. A soft serve bar gives them one. It is also the point in the evening when a queue is a good thing rather than a problem: it puts people side by side who have not spoken yet.
One machine comfortably covers about 200 guests across a two to three hour window. The number that catches couples out is not the headcount, it is the window. Two hundred people over three hours is relaxed. Two hundred people in forty-five minutes, because you have a send-off at nine, is a different job and probably a second machine.
So when you tell us your guest count, tell us your send-off time too. That second number changes the quote more often than the first one does.
We arrive about an hour before you want to be serving. The machine has to bring its barrel down to temperature before it will pour properly, so that hour is not padding. Plan for us to be in the room and set up while guests are still at dinner, which also means telling us where the machine is going before the day rather than on it.
The dessert table photographs best in its first twenty minutes, before the toppings get picked over. If you want a shot of it, ask your photographer to take it when we open rather than at the end of the night.
If yours is an open house rather than a seated reception, none of the above applies in the same way — guests trickle rather than surge, and the machine simply runs the whole time. We have written separately about that format.
Tell us your date, your guest count and your send-off time and we will tell you what we would bring.
