In short
- Italian Banquet Company catered a 50th-birthday banquet for 26 guests at Teaninich Castle, an exclusive-use castle near Alness in Easter Ross, in the Highlands north of Inverness.
- The guests had travelled from across Europe to celebrate a friend's fiftieth birthday together.
- Service was carried by chef Anas and two front-of-house waitresses, Nichola and Megan — a three-person brigade, working without the founder on site.
- Anas drove up from the Edinburgh area, a four-hour trip north; Nichola and Megan made up the front-of-house team, one of them joining from about an hour away.
- Dinner ran through five parts — a table of appetisers, a starter, a main course and a dessert, with bread and butter kept on the table throughout the night.
- Jacob, who booked the celebration, recorded a video message afterwards, talking about Anas by name — proof the standard holds up a long way from where the company started.
On a Saturday in Easter Ross, a job that proved the standard travels even when the founder doesn't.
The team, not just the founder
Ask most small catering businesses who is cooking on a given Saturday and the honest answer is: it depends who's free. Ask Italian Banquet Company and the answer is supposed to be the same no matter who is standing at the stove. That is the entire premise of running a brigade rather than a one-man operation — the standard belongs to the company, not to whichever chef happens to be holding the knife that day.
Teaninich Castle put that properly to the test. I wasn't there. This was a team of three — chef Anas, and waitresses Nichola and Megan — sent north to look after a fiftieth birthday for twenty-six guests, most of whom had flown in from elsewhere in Europe for the occasion. Anas drove up from the Edinburgh area to reach Alness, the best part of a day's driving each way. One of the waitresses joined from about an hour away rather than travelling the full distance, which is deliberate: wherever we can, we put a local face on the front-of-house side of a job this far north, and let the kitchen team be the ones doing the long travelling — they're the ones with the recipes and the timings memorised.
What came back afterwards told me the trip was worth it. Jacob — who booked the celebration — recorded a video message once the night was over, talking about Anas specifically, unprompted. That matters to me more than a star rating: it says the standard held up on a night I wasn't there to see, in a kitchen none of us had worked in before.
Teaninich Castle
Teaninich sits just outside Alness, on the Cromarty Firth side of the Highlands, within an easy run of Inverness. It's a nine-bedroom, exclusive-use house rather than a hotel — the kind of venue booked whole, for a wedding or a milestone weekend, not a table at a time. The building carries real history: stonework with inscriptions said to predate Culloden, a family — the Munros — who held the estate from the sixteenth century, and, more recently, a distillery one of them founded on the estate in 1817, still producing whisky two centuries on. The walled garden even has its own small literary legend attached, said locally to be a possible inspiration for Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden.
None of that history cooks a dinner, but it shapes the room you're cooking into. A house like Teaninich has its own weight and its own quiet — the kind of setting where a birthday dinner for twenty-six people doesn't need dressing up to feel like an occasion. It already is one.
A birthday, not a wedding — and that matters
Most of what Italian Banquet Company is known for is weddings, and rightly so — it's the bulk of the calendar. But a fiftieth birthday, celebrated properly, asks for something closer to a wedding banquet than most people expect: a full sit-down service, a real menu arc, and a room that's been thought about rather than just booked. Twenty-six guests is small enough to plan intimately and large enough to need a proper brigade running the pass — exactly the gap Italian Banquet Company exists to fill, too big for a dinner party and too personal for a hotel banqueting suite.
The service ran the way a full banquet should. Guests arrived to a table of appetisers while they found their seats, then the meal proper began — a starter, a main course and a dessert, with bread and butter kept on the table from the first course to the last, the way any good Italian dinner should be. Nothing about that format changes because the venue is four hours from home, or because the guest of honour is turning fifty rather than getting married. The brigade, the timing, the standard — all of it travels.
What this job says about the practice
We take milestone birthdays as seriously as weddings, and we'll travel as far for one — Alness is further north than most of our calendar reaches, and it won't be the last time we go there. What mattered most about this particular Saturday, though, wasn't the distance. It was that Anas, Nichola and Megan could arrive at a castle they'd never worked in before, cook and serve a full banquet for twenty-six guests who'd flown in from across Europe, and leave the kind of impression a client chooses to put on video, unprompted, once the night was done.
That's not a claim I can make about myself. It's a claim about the team.
Frequently asked questions
Does Italian Banquet Company cater birthdays and private celebrations, not just weddings?
Yes. Italian Banquet Company caters weddings, milestone birthdays, anniversaries and private celebrations across Scotland with the same full-brigade service — a chef-led team cooking on site, not a set menu delivered cold.
Where is Teaninich Castle and what kind of venue is it?
Teaninich Castle is an exclusive-use, nine-bedroom castle near Alness in Easter Ross, in the Scottish Highlands, within easy reach of Inverness. It hosts weddings and private celebrations, and Italian Banquet Company catered a 50th-birthday banquet there for 26 guests.
Does Giuseppe Manzoli personally cook every Italian Banquet Company event?
No. Italian Banquet Company operates as a brigade, not a solo chef. Giuseppe Manzoli founded and trains the team, but events are regularly staffed and cooked by other chefs and front-of-house staff within the company — at Teaninich Castle, chef Anas led the kitchen with waitresses Nichola and Megan front of house.
How far will Italian Banquet Company travel for an event?
Italian Banquet Company caters events across Scotland, including the Highlands, Aberdeenshire, Perthshire and Argyll, alongside its core coverage of Fife and central Scotland. Travel distance is factored into planning rather than a barrier to booking.
What does a typical Italian Banquet Company banquet menu look like?
A typical Italian Banquet Company banquet runs from a table of appetisers through a full meal — starter, main course and dessert — with bread and butter served throughout, cooked on site by a full chef's brigade rather than pre-plated off-site.
Related reading
- The Morning After: A Wedding at Mar Lodge
- The Long Walk to the Table: Cooking a Wedding at Glamis Castle
- Scottish wedding venues we cater at
- Wedding catering FAQs
Giuseppe Manzoli is the founder and head chef of Italian Banquet Company, cooking weddings, milestone celebrations and private events across Scotland — from Highland castles like Teaninich to Fife country houses and Perthshire estates.
If you're planning a birthday, anniversary or wedding at a venue in the Highlands — or anywhere else in Scotland — we'd love to hear from you.
