There is something almost deceptive about a beautifully arranged buffet at a Lagos party. The chafing dishes are polished, the food is steaming, the servers are neatly dressed, and guests are already eyeing the proteins before they have even picked up a plate.
Everything looks effortless. As though the food simply appeared.
It didn’t.
What guests see is the final stage of a job that started much earlier, often before most people have even thought about breakfast.
The Shopping List Is Really A Map Of Lagos
Before there is any cooking, there is shopping. And if you are catering for a sizeable crowd, one market is hardly ever enough.
Depending on the menu, you could be at Mile 12 buying peppers, tomatoes, and vegetables; Oke-Arin for rice, spices, and other provisions; and Mushin for fresh meat. Then there are the less obvious essentials: foil, takeaway packs, gloves, gas, charcoal, drinks, ice and all the other things required to feed 100, 200 or 300 people.
This is where the calculations begin. You need enough food without sending the client’s budget into another dimension. Experienced caterers learn where to buy what, compare prices and quality and understand that knowing the markets is almost as important as knowing the kitchen.
By the time a client asks why feeding their guests costs what it does, “everything is expensive” is not much of an answer. You need to have done the maths.
The Kitchen Starts Before The Party Does
For a big event, preparation may begin a day or two earlier. Meat has to be cleaned, seasoned and portioned. Vegetables are sorted and washed. Peppers, tomatoes and onions are blended. Stock is made. Anything that can reasonably be prepared ahead usually is.
Then the big day arrives.
Depending on the event, the kitchen may be working by 3 am or 4 am. While the guests are asleep, pots are already on the fire. Rice is being washed. Stews are bubbling. Meat is frying. Jollof is being stirred. Someone is checking quantities. Someone else is looking for the foil.
There is very little room for delay. If the food needs to leave at a particular time, it has to leave.
Lagos traffic does not care that your rice took an extra 20 minutes to cook.
The Food Is Only Half The Job
Then there is the service team. When they do their job properly, guests barely notice the work involved.
Plates need washing, cutlery counting, glasses cleaning and chafing dishes assembling. Trays, serving spoons, food warmers, napkins and tablecloths all have to be ready before anyone arrives.
And there is a surprising amount of counting.
If you are expecting 150 guests, you need enough of everything to serve them. At the end of the night, you’ll also want most of it back.
That second part is not always as straightforward as it sounds.
The Party Ends. The Work Doesn’t.
Guests eat, drink, dance, take pictures and eventually go home. Some stay until the DJ is practically begging them to leave.
The service team stays too.
Servers are collecting glasses while guests say their goodbyes and clearing plates while the last songs are playing. Then comes the packing.
There is almost always a missing glass. Someone has somehow gone home with a plate. Cutlery occasionally finds its way into a bag or car because apparently it looked like a nice little souvenir. Napkins disappear too.
Sometimes people genuinely do not realise these things belong to the caterer. Sometimes they know very well.
Either way, somebody has to account for them. And that person is usually not the guest who walked away with the plate.
What You Are Really Paying For
By the time the last chafing dish is packed away, the people behind the buffet may have been working for 12 or 14 hours. They have shopped, prepared, cooked, transported, set up, served, cleared and packed. They have carried heavy trays, stood for hours, worked around hot kitchens and still smiled through the person asking, for the fifth time, “Please, just give me one more chicken.”
There is only so much chicken.
This is why outdoor catering cannot simply be judged by the price of a plate of rice. The bill also covers planning, market runs, preparation, transport, equipment, service staff and hours of labour. Most importantly, somebody has to work out how hundreds of people can eat at roughly the same time without seeing any of the chaos behind it.
By the time that spoonful of jollof reaches a guest, it may have travelled from a Lagos market through hours of preparation, an early-morning kitchen and unpredictable traffic before finally landing in a polished chafing dish.
That is the trick of good catering.
You see the buffet. You don’t see everything it took to put it there.
Spice, Smoke and Story is a food column by Funke Babs-Kufeji, telling her love story for cooking and food in Nigeria, while exploring everything from restaurant reviews and recipes to fine dining, hosting and the culture that shapes how we eat.
@bafunke_babskufeji
