Ever wondered how much your catering cutlery says about your establishment? As with many things in the catering and hospitality industry, it’s the small things that make the biggest impact, in this case the degree to which your catering crockery and cutlery suit the tone of your restaurant, bar or café.

Obviously all crockery and cutlery needs to be spotlessly clean – that goes without saying. So whether you opt for ornate cutlery or bog standard fish and chip restaurant knives and forks, you’ll need to be sure you’re buying proper catering cutlery, capable of withstanding multiple uses and washes in the same day.

Beyond that, you have to think about how well your catering crockery is aligned with the feeling you want your establishment to promote. To give an obvious example – if you run the Savoy Grill, or the Ritz Tearooms, you probably want to be looking at catering cutlery in keeping with the times: Regency style knives and forks and find china. But still capable of withstanding extreme use and high temperature washing on a regular basis.

If, on the other hand, you run a good old greasy spoon, you want decent generic white chinaware and good old fashioned café cutlery – thick and reassuring, no frills of course.

The smallest factors in an establishment’s environment are the things that validate or destroy its image. An inauthentic look, something out of place with the overall tenor of your premises, and you can destroy whatever illusion you are hoping to create – whether that’s of a laid back surf bar or a fully formal black tie dining experience. You don’t get silver service without silver.

So your catering crockery and catering cutlery is more than just an instrument with which your customer eats his food and from which she drinks her drinks. It’s also part of the décor – and as such you should pay as much attention to what it looks and feels like as you do to its individual unit prices.

There are clearly some establishments with a more pressing demand for unique or signature catering crockery and catering cutlery. No-one cares what the spoons in a greasy spoon look like as long as they are obviously the right kind of thing for the atmosphere – but if you run a trendy café bar, or a boutique brasserie, you probably want to carry actual design elements through to the chinaware and the knives and forks.

That means selecting catering crockery with unusual shapes and designs. And picking out catering cutlery with organic form or a unique finish to it.

If your theme is ethnic or global food you may even want to invest in patterned crockery representing different colour and culture from around the world.

So as you can see there’s more to think about than you thought! Make the right choice and your whole establishment will hang together.