The Italian Banquet Company is based in Scotland, but the kitchen travels — and it always has. Beyond the country houses and Highland lodges, we've cooked destination events abroad, including a residency in Romania. When people ask how far we'll go, the honest answer is: as far as the occasion is. A kitchen that's already built to arrive at a remote estate at the end of a single-track road is, it turns out, a kitchen that can go almost anywhere.
A Kitchen Built to Arrive
Most of what we do every week is, in a sense, a destination job. The venues we cook in don't come with a working professional kitchen — a country house, a castle, a lodge on the shore of a loch. So we've spent years getting very good at one particular skill: turning up somewhere that isn't a restaurant and cooking a full, proper menu there anyway. Bringing the brigade, the kit and the discipline, learning an unfamiliar space fast, and serving food that tastes like it came out of a kitchen we'd worked in for years. Once that's second nature, a border is just a longer drive.
The Romania Residency
Our work abroad has included a residency in Romania — the kind of booking where you don't just cater an event, you move in and cook across days, for a group who want to eat well every day they're together. Cooking in another country sharpens everything. You learn a new set of local suppliers and what their larder does best, you adapt to a kitchen you've never stood in, and you hold your own standards steady in unfamiliar surroundings. It's demanding, and it's some of the most rewarding work there is, because the people you're feeding are usually far from home and the table becomes the thing that makes a strange place feel like one.
Destination Events, Wherever They Are
Whether it's a wedding on a remote Scottish island, a milestone celebration at a house abroad, or a residency that asks us to cook for a group day after day, the promise is the same one we make at home: a full brigade, on site, cooking a complete menu from scratch — hand-made pasta and the best of whatever local larder we find ourselves beside. The setting changes. The way we cook doesn't.
So if your celebration is somewhere beautiful and a long way from a professional kitchen, that's not an obstacle for us. That, more or less, is the entire job.
Giuseppe Manzoli is the founder and head chef of The Italian Banquet Company, cooking weddings, residencies and destination events across Scotland and beyond — a full chef's brigade that comes to you and cooks on site.