The Italian Banquet Company cooks for whole rooms — and whole rooms come with whole spreads of dietary needs. Vegetarians and vegans. Coeliacs and gluten avoidance. Nut allergies, dairy, shellfish, the genuine medical and the strong preference. Children who eat one colour of food. At any large table now, catering for everyone at once is not the exception; it's the job. How a kitchen handles that says more about it than almost anything on the menu.
Nobody Eats Differently
The thing we care about most is dignity. There is a particular small humiliation in being the guest who gets handed a sad, separate, obviously-an-afterthought plate while everyone else is served something wonderful. We design menus so that doesn't happen. The person who can't eat gluten or dairy gets a dish that is genuinely as good as everyone else's — not a stripped-back apology, but something cooked with the same care and intended to be just as enjoyable. Wherever we can, we cook so the whole table is eating variations of the same lovely meal, and no one feels singled out.
Handling It at Scale
Doing this for a handful of people is easy. Doing it for a large wedding or celebration, every plate landing hot and right and to the correct person, takes real planning and a brigade that communicates. We gather dietary needs properly in advance, build them into the menu from the start rather than bolting them on at the end, and run the service so that every special plate reaches exactly the right seat. Italian cooking helps here too — so much of it is naturally vegetable-led, and a great deal can be made beautifully without gluten or dairy without ever feeling like a compromise.
And Why Several Desserts
Which brings us to dessert — and to a small philosophy we hold dear. We like to put more than one dessert on the table, and not only for the dietary reasons (though a spread of desserts is a wonderful way to make sure everyone has something glorious to finish on). We do it because abundance at the end of a meal is a kind of generosity. A single plated dessert says the meal is over. A table of them — tiramisu, panna cotta, something fruit-led, something for the children — says stay, have both, this is a celebration. Nobody ever left a wedding complaining there was too much pudding.
Underneath all of it is one idea: a generous table that leaves no one out. Feeding everyone properly — every diet, every age, every preference — isn't an obligation we tolerate. It's the whole point of cooking for people in the first place.
Giuseppe Manzoli is the founder and head chef of The Italian Banquet Company, cooking weddings, celebrations and events across Scotland — handling complex dietary needs at scale, with a full chef's brigade that comes to you and cooks on site.