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Have you ever been to a wedding where the food was less than desirable? A soggy salad and dry bread? Nine times out of ten, it is because the food came from a kitchen, locked in a hotbox, traveling from miles away, made the day before and heated up the morning of.
If you want the *most* tender beef brisket, a salmon entree served steaming hot on a warm plate, or a filet served at the perfect medium rare. The hotbox method of wedding catering is not the way to go. So what is your other option? If your venue does not have a kitchen and requires you to find an outside caterer - your other option is an onsite caterer like Mountain Laurel!
Hot Transport Catering vs. Onsite Catering
At Mountain Laurel Catering and Events, we want to accentuate the small touches that bring out the best in our food for you and your guests. We strive to bring our clients the highest quality food products every time… and for that reason we bring a whole, working kitchen to you!
Many caterers are “hot transport” caterers, and that means that they cook food in their kitchen and transport the food to the wedding venue using hot boxes in box trucks. At Mountain Laurel Catering, we like to think outside of the box! This method works well for some foods, because certain dishes (pasta) transport well and their quality will not suffer from the transportation process. Other, more sensitive types of foods (salmon, brussel sprouts), will not fare well traveling long distances and will degrade in quality the longer they sit in the hot box! Fried food is definitely a no-go in hot boxes. Fried food gets soggy and the quality suffers the longer it is in the closed box.
What Sets Mountain Laurel Catering Apart
We take pride in our food and our customer service, and nothing makes us prouder than hearing the “oohh’s and aahh's” from your guests when our servers bring out our world famous Philly cheesesteak egg-rolls fresh from the oven, or bacon wrapped scallops hot off the line! We love to serve hors d'oeuvres that come hot out of the oven or our fryer, because what sets us apart is our attention to detail and our commitment to providing you the highest quality food we possibly can every time! We can’t imagine doing it any differently.
We have three mobile kitchens that live in our parking lot that we will use to cook all of the food at your event. Our original trailer is semi-retired, it is painted red and goes by the moniker “Panama Red.” It is the smallest of our trailers and only comes out on the road with us if we have a limited space to park or maneuver or if we are executing three weddings on the same day! Our other two trailers are decorated with our green and purple logo and some very cool (and not nerdy at all) flames on the side. We call these two large white trailers Berry White and Betty White (RIP). They are the backbone of our on-site experience!
Each trailer has a fryer, two ovens, a stove top and a flat top grill, a prep table, and most importantly a hand washing sink! Executive Chef Pat Combs went above and beyond designing these trailers very specifically, and had to take a few road trips down to Georgia to pick them up and drive them all the way back north after they were custom made!
Very importantly, we maintain our trailers and clean them many times throughout the year, and they have to pass a thorough health inspection to make sure they are up to code and ready to hit the road! We always prefer to plug into an outlet when we arrive, for the sake of sound and ease, but each trailer comes with a generator attached so we can do our thing anytime, anywhere regardless!
So if having the freshest food cooked only minutes before it is served (and not sitting for hours in a box) is your aim, you know who to turn to!!