The per-guest weights that actually work
For a full lunch buffet, plan on roughly 500 to 600 grams of food per guest across all courses. That splits into about 120 g of starters and salads, 180 to 220 g for the hot dish including its accompaniment, 40 to 50 g of cheese and 100 to 120 g of dessert.
Bread is counted separately at one to one and a half individual rolls per guest, or about 60 g. In a French setting bread is not optional at lunch and running out of it is noticed immediately.
Add a margin of ten percent on the total, not on every line. A margin applied to every dish produces a buffet that is visibly over-ordered on the items nobody was going to take twice.
How many dishes, not how much of each
Below twenty guests: one hot dish plus a vegetarian alternative, three or four starters and salads, one cheese board, two desserts. More variety than that on a small buffet looks scattered and leaves half-empty dishes.
Twenty to sixty guests: one or two hot dishes plus a vegetarian alternative, five or six starters and salads, a cheese board and three desserts. This is the range where a second hot dish genuinely improves the buffet.
Above sixty: two hot dishes plus a vegetarian alternative and a duplicated serving line. Beyond sixty guests the constraint stops being the food and becomes the flow, and adding a seventh salad does nothing while duplicating the line halves the queue.
Give us the headcount and the room, and we will size the buffet and the serving layout with you.
Get a buffet quote →The vegetarian dish is not an option
Every Crozy buffet includes a vegetarian hot dish as standard, and that is the right default for an office. In a French corporate group, plan on ten to fifteen percent of guests eating the vegetarian option, and more in a young or international team.
Do not size the vegetarian dish for the declared vegetarians alone. It is taken by people who simply prefer it that day, which is why a vegetarian dish portioned for four out of forty disappears in the first five minutes and creates the impression of a buffet that has run out.
Label it clearly, and label anything containing pork. In an international office, these two labels do more for how the buffet is received than any amount of additional variety.
Table space and serving points
Allow four to five metres of table for fifty guests on a single serving line. The most common Paris office failure is a buffet compressed onto two small meeting tables, which turns a twelve-minute service into a thirty-minute queue.
One serving line per fifty guests. Above that, duplicate the line rather than lengthening it, and set it up so guests can approach from both sides. A double-sided line halves the service time at no extra food cost.
Leave the table accessible on three sides if the room allows it. A buffet pushed against a wall is a single-file queue by construction, and no amount of good food fixes that.
Timing the service
Delivery lands about forty-five minutes before service so the buffet is laid out properly rather than assembled while guests watch. For a 12:30 lunch, plan a delivery window that closes at 11:45.
Fifty guests through a single well-laid line take about twenty minutes to serve themselves. Add that to your agenda rather than assuming the hour you allocated is eating time.
Cold dishes hold for about two hours at room temperature and hot dishes for about one. If your session is at risk of overrunning, meal trays are a better choice than a buffet: they hold, they need no queue, and they survive a late finish.