The lead times
24 hours for most standard menus: breakfasts, coffee breaks, meal trays and buffets in usual formats; a few menus need 48. From one hundred guests, 48 hours, then three days from five hundred, four from a thousand, five at two thousand and a week beyond. Outside Île-de-France, five days.
Booking earlier than the minimum is the comfortable option for a full seminar day or a large event. The constraint at that size is rarely production; it is the delivery slot and the coordination of several drop-offs against a single agenda.
These lead times run in calendar hours, weekends included, and are counted from confirmation rather than from the first email: a quote requested on Thursday evening and signed on Monday morning was never a 24-hour order.
The French calendar traps
Lead times run in calendar hours, weekends included: a Monday morning breakfast is ordered by Saturday or Sunday at the latest, not on Monday morning. This is the single most frequent lead-time mistake made by teams planning from outside France.
May is full of public holidays, and many of them create a pont, a bridge day, where the Friday between a Thursday holiday and the weekend is effectively closed. Check the French calendar before fixing a May date, not after.
The first two weeks of August are the quietest fortnight of the French business year, and the last week of December is the second. Both are workable, but confirm availability earlier than you otherwise would.
Give us the date, the address and the arrival time, and we will confirm the delivery window.
Check a date →Delivery windows and what they mean
A delivery window is the slot in which the van arrives, not the moment the food is ready to serve. Breakfast set-ups are scheduled to finish before your stated start time, and buffets need about forty-five minutes on site before service.
Tell us the time your guests arrive rather than the time you would like the delivery. The schedule is then built backwards from that, which is the version that works.
Paris traffic is a real variable between 08:00 and 09:30 and again from 17:00. A delivery window is built with that in mind, which is why it is a window rather than a time.
Building access, the real blocker
Many Paris office buildings have a service entrance that is the only one usable for a delivery, a reception desk that requires the delivery to be announced in advance by name, and a lift that needs a badge. Any one of the three, unhandled, delays a set-up.
Nominate one person who is physically present at the delivery time, and give us their name. Not a colleague who will be in a meeting, and not a general reception number. One name, present, reachable.
If your building requires an access request, submit it when you confirm the order rather than the day before. Building management in Paris often needs 48 hours for a named visitor, which is longer than the catering lead time itself.
Delivery across Île-de-France
We deliver to the eight departments of Île-de-France, the Greater Paris region: Paris, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de-Marne, Yvelines, Essonne, Val-d'Oise and Seine-et-Marne.
Delivery is included in the price everywhere except Seine-et-Marne (77), and on-site set-up is an option, which carries a small distance supplement stated on the quote rather than added at invoicing.
For an event elsewhere in France, ask for an event quote. It is possible, it is simply not a standard delivery, and the logistics have to be priced rather than assumed.