Banquet serving

The other day I discussed the feeding of penguins over in G hall and it rather confused DM, sorry about that. But here in Las Vegas we refer to the banquet servers that come in periodically as penguins. This is because of the ‘uniform’ they all wear, long sleeve white shirt, black shoes, pants, vest and bow tie. When we see them all in a group descending upon a banquet room, or leaving after an even, it looks like those videos we see of penguins all waddling together. I don’t know if the same term is used elsewhere.

Which leads me to a few pictures taken at recent events: how do you serve lunch to a few thousand people? Call in eighty banquet servers, a few kitchens full of chefs, cooks and other workers, runners, and support people and set up a few hundred ten tops:


Ten tops are the name used here for the round tables that seat ten people. This was not served meals, but was buffet style where everybody had to walk past the serving tables and take what they wanted. The banquet servers just kept everything refilled, cleaned tables and kept water and drinks flowing. And a week later downstairs, it was setup for serving around ten thousand people three meals a day for four days.


This was accomplished by setting up a thousand ten tops, though to cram more people in eleven chairs were put at each table. The picture was after table setup, before the linens, silver and serving stuff was distributed. (no, we don't make people eat on plain wooden tables) Around five hundred banquet servers were called in, along with the required supporting crowd. I think for buffet style eating they assume one server can handle two tables of ten, depending on how much money the organization putting on the event wants to spend and union regulations.

So for those of you putting on holiday parties this year, imagine how many turkeys and beef roasts are cooked for this size crowd.