event-hospitality

Event Hospitality

You decide what the event feeds everybody, when, and what the social half of it looks like. Your output is a hospitality brief somebody else turns into an order, a contract and a rota.

Four decisions:

• The catering service style.
• What a scheduled break contains.
• The alcohol posture.
• Whether an evening or social programme exists.

Set the shared floor, never a population's top-up. Every other hospitality skill layers on it: samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-speaker-experience and samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-attendee-experience each add only their own population's layer on top of these fundamentals. Never re-decide a speakers' dinner, a volunteer meal, or a VIP table.

Two adjacent scopes you do not own

Both are routinely filed under hospitality. Reclaiming either duplicates a sibling skill:

• Signage, wayfinding and facilities belong to samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-attendee-experience outright: it designs the wayfinding, locates the quiet room and places the meal line in the floor plan.
• Welcome register, staff warmth, MC tone and catering-as-identity belong to samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-cultural-identity, which already claims catering as a touchpoint of the register. Execute inside whichever register it set; never redesign it.

What survives is food, drink, breaks, alcohol and the evening.

Where every boundary sits

Sibling	The line
event-vendor-sourcing	Sources, vets, contracts the caterer from your decision; owns delivery buffers, lead times, the fire-code trap. Decide the style; never the supplier or contract term.
event-attendee-experience	Owns on-site distribution choreography (table, line, how a restricted meal reaches the right person) - refuses to rank its two fulfilment models since your style decision is what the contract carries.
event-accessibility-inclusion	Decides which dietary needs the event commits to and at what depth. Never invent that list; choose a style that can carry it.
Alcohol (one-sided seam)	You set the default posture and design the alcohol-free provision; event-accessibility-inclusion owns it only where a medical/religious/recovery accommodation turns a default into an access commitment.
event-schedule-design	Places breaks and lunch in the grid. You own what a break contains and hand it the service window needed; never move or lengthen a slot.
event-no-show-management	Owns the expected-show-up number. Take it; never derive your own.
event-venue-sourcing	Negotiates the F&B minimum and mandated-caterer clause. Your style/headcount are inputs, never terms you sign.
event-volunteers	Owns food at the post as a shift mechanic.
event-volunteer-experience	Owns the off-duty top-up, inheriting dietary/allergen/alcohol exposure from this skill's output.

Every ranking below is a default, not a law. Re-rank all four menus after the interview, against what you already know about this event. Each of these overturns a default rung:

• A mandated-caterer venue running its own bar.
• A room with no seated capacity.
• A sponsor who already bought the coffee.
• A community whose evening is the reason people come.
• A team with nobody free to own an evening.

Interview

Ask one question at a time, multiple-choice where possible. Questions 8-10 exist because the menus diverge sharply on effort, durability and time-to-effect: nobody can pick those defaults for the user.

1. What does the published grid give you - meal-sized gaps, breaks, lengths, catering windows the venue fixed? Take these; never move them.
2. Does the room seat the whole population, or standing/circulating only? May outside food and drink enter?
3. Which dietary categories has the event committed to, and at what depth? Ask; never invent the list.
4. What are the declared counts, collected from everyone fed (attendees, speakers, volunteers, organizers, sponsor staff) or only registered attendees?
5. What number are you feeding, and where from? An expected-show-up figure, never a registration count.
6. What did venue and supplier answer on equipment/service: open flame, chafing dishes, who may serve, mandated caterer, house bar?
7. Has any sponsorship already sold the coffee, lunch, or evening as a named branded surface? If yes, that rung's budget and effort aren't yours.
8. One-off or recurring, where the evening is part of why people return? What register did culture work set for the meal? Does the audience's social norm include drinking?
9. Effort ceiling: named evening owner, catering budget line, volunteer hours for replenishment, what last edition left you?
10. By what date must each decision be final - headcount guarantee, equipment/licence lead times, evening venue hold date? Those dates, not the event date, rank these menus.

Who controls the food

Two axes discriminate here. Say which pole a recommendation assumes whenever they differ.

• Who controls the food and bar, you or the building. A mandated-caterer venue, universities being the named case, decides most of the catering style and half of the alcohol posture before you rank anything. Ask Q6 first.
• Community-run against vendor or corporate-run. Barely moves the first three menus. It reshapes the evening programme, where a paid owner and a second venue are ordinary at one pole and exceptional at the other.

Workflow

1. Write down what you may not move: the grid's gaps and catering windows, the accessibility bar's dietary categories, the expected-show-up number, the culture work's register. Anything conflicting is an ask routed to that sibling.
2. Collect dietary counts before choosing anything - from everyone fed, not only registered attendees. The input every rung ranks against, and the one most often gathered last.
3. Pick the catering service style, checked against the counts and Q6's venue answers. A style the building forbids is not a style.
4. Decide what a break contains, handing event-schedule-design the service window as a requirement, never a grid edit.
5. Set the alcohol posture before anyone books a room for the evening - it's cheaper to answer now than after a venue is held.
6. Decide whether an evening programme exists, and publish the answer either way. An unannounced absence sends people to an unhosted bar.
7. Write the hospitality brief: style/counts to event-vendor-sourcing, distribution requirements to event-attendee-experience, alcohol posture to event-risk-management and event-code-of-conduct, evening scope to whoever owns it.
8. Present the brief section by section for approval before anything is ordered.

If your harness has persistent memory, record per edition:

• The declared counts against the counts actually served.
• Which restrictions the supplier could not cover, and which fallback was used.
• How long the longest meal queue ran.
• What was left over.
• Who stayed for the evening.
• The exact settings of any keep-warm or holding equipment, including one that failed. A wrong setting fails silently, so the same equipment gets re-guessed every edition unless the working one is written down.

Next edition ranks against that record instead of these defaults.

Catering service style

How food physically reaches people. Four rungs, built out from the sourced pair of plated-or-individual and family-style shared platters. The four-rung ladder, both value axes and every ordering below are this skill's own construction.

Value splits two ways, and each way orders the rungs differently:

• Everyone fed and correctly matched - every declared restriction reaches the person who declared it.
• The meal as the shared moment - the grid's longest gap is spent on it, and the style decides whether people spend it around the same dish or holding their own item somewhere else.

Fancier is not better on either axis.

Ranking (default, not a law - Q2, Q4 and Q6 re-rank it):

• effort (equipment, service staffing, room setup, per-guest matching, venue answers you must clear): plated per-guest service > family-style shared platters > self-serve buffet with posted allergen labelling > individually packaged labelled meals
• value, everyone fed and correctly matched: individually packaged labelled meals > plated per-guest service > self-serve buffet with posted allergen labelling > family-style shared platters
• value, the meal as the shared moment: family-style shared platters > plated per-guest service > self-serve buffet with posted allergen labelling > individually packaged labelled meals
• compliance cost (review triggered, reversibility spent): family-style shared platters > self-serve buffet with posted allergen labelling > plated per-guest service > individually packaged labelled meals
• efficiency: individually packaged labelled meals > self-serve buffet with posted allergen labelling > family-style shared platters > plated per-guest service

No rung dominates: the value axes oppose each other, and plated beats buffet on both value axes and compliance but loses on effort alone. Pair-by-pair proof: references/service-styles-and-dietary-carry.md.

• Individually packaged labelled meals (default) - each meal handed over as its own item: lowest cost, top being-fed value, a restricted meal unambiguous. Assumed by event-attendee-experience's separate-table model. Move up one rung when Q1's gap absorbs a line, Q2 seats people, Q4's counts are thin enough for a labelled station without per-person matching.
• Self-serve buffet with posted allergen labelling - a line with allergen detail posted before it forms. Higher throughput, genuinely social. Fails one way: a restricted dish taken by the wrong person. Never run unlabelled.
• Family-style shared platters (starved rung) - tops shared-moment value and compliance cost, so efficiency never picks it. Needs a longer pre-service setup window. Promote when Q8 says the edition recurs and culture work wants the shared table. Delete outright when Q6 says the venue restricts open flame or chafing dishes.
• Plated per-guest service (starved rung) - tops effort, second on both value axes, never wins the ratio. Turns a restriction into a plate rather than vigilance. Promote when Q2 seats the whole population, Q4 shows dense restrictions, Q6/Q9 confirm service staff exist. Part of its effort cost is easy to undercount: cutlery and crockery add a dishwashing bottleneck a tray-served style never creates. On a volunteer-served multi-meal event, weigh that bottleneck against perceived formality.

Deleted, never demoted: the same buffet with nothing labelled. It would win efficiency outright, which is exactly why it cannot sit on that line. It is the buffet with the declaration removed, and the person the declaration was for is the one who finds out.

What a break contains

What sits in a gap the grid already placed, decided per break and not settled once a day. Four rungs, this skill's own construction.

Every rung is the rung below it plus something. Effort and value therefore run in the same order, so no rung beats another on value while costing less: the menu comes out clean by construction, which is not evidence that it is right. Check it against Q1's actual gap lengths and Q2's outside-food answer, never against the ranking itself.

Ranking (default, not a law - Q1, Q7 and Q9 re-rank it):

• effort (setup, a per-break owner and the volunteer hours behind them, budget line): catered break bar with dietary-labelled stations > snack-enhanced break > owned replenishment at each break > standing self-serve water and hot drinks
• value (people who stay in the building and come back into the room, and whose break is not spent hunting): catered break bar with dietary-labelled stations > snack-enhanced break > owned replenishment at each break > standing self-serve water and hot drinks
• compliance cost (review triggered, reversibility spent): catered break bar with dietary-labelled stations == snack-enhanced break > owned replenishment at each break == standing self-serve water and hot drinks
• efficiency: owned replenishment at each break > snack-enhanced break > standing self-serve water and hot drinks > catered break bar with dietary-labelled stations

Compliance ties: the upper pair ties because any break carrying food triggers an allergen declaration regardless of station count. The lower pair ties at honest zero - water and hot drinks declare nothing.

Size the chosen rung against a per-attendee catering convention rather than against richness alone: references/break-quantities-and-service-flow.md carries the quantities.

• Owned replenishment at each break (default) - a standing station with a named person restocking against the grid's break times. Leads efficiency by removing the actual failure: a station empty the minute the room arrives. Costs a rota slot. Move up when Q1 shows a gap long enough that people leave the building.
• Snack-enhanced break - food alongside drinks, allergen detail posted. First rung carrying a declaration duty; keeps people on site.
• Standing self-serve water and hot drinks - up all day, refilled when noticed. Ranked below the snack rung because its whole advantage - availability any minute - is worth least at the minutes that matter.
• Catered break bar with dietary-labelled stations (starved rung) - tops value and effort together, so efficiency never picks it. Promote only when Q1 shows no meal-sized gap at all, or Q7 says a sponsor bought the coffee as a named branded surface.

Deleted, never demoted: the station s

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