Service area
BBQ Catering in RenoNevada
It is also the biggest market we reach, and that changes what people ask for. Events here tend to be larger, booked further ahead and held on ground that belongs to somebody else — a company field day, a golf tournament, a park shelter reserved months in advance. Every one of those is a headcount and access problem before it is a menu problem.
- Distance from our base
- about 29 miles northStraight-line from 5110 S Edmonds Dr, Carson City — not a road distance.
- County
- Washoe County, Nevada
- Good to know
- An incorporated city and the seat of Washoe County — the largest city anywhere in the range this outfit covers.
What a Reno booking usually looks like
The work this outfit is built for up here is communal and corporate: company picnics, employee appreciation days, golf tournaments, fundraisers, and the sort of family event that has outgrown a backyard. It is the one market in our range where a single client may be feeding several hundred people at once, and where the person booking is an HR manager or an events coordinator rather than the host.
The city's hotel and casino properties run their own ballrooms and their own kitchens, so the events we are the right answer for are almost never indoor ones on a venue's floor. They are outdoors — a park, a lawn, a parking lot, a jobsite — somewhere with room for a trailer and no kitchen of any kind. That suits how we already work, because we do not need one.
Before you pick the spot
Three things worth checking early, because they decide more about an outdoor event up here than the menu does.
- Room for the trailer
- The smoker travels on a twenty-foot trailer and has to get in, turn, and park within reach of the serving line. Gate width, surface and turning room are the first things to check at a park or an office lot.
- The park's paperwork
- City and county parks generally want a reservation and a permit before an outside vendor sets up, and the lead time on that is often longer than ours. Ask the park office what they need from a caterer as soon as you have a date.
- No kitchen required
- There is no venue kitchen in most of this work and there does not need to be. Cooker, serving line, tables to serve on and tents to serve under all travel with the crew. What the site has to supply is space, access and somewhere reasonably level.
The cooker makes the triptoo
Twenty-nine miles is the whole argument for doing it this way. A caterer who cooks at a commissary and drives the food over has to get it to Reno hot, and everything that happens to barbecue between a kitchen and a buffet line happens on that drive. We move the cooker instead, and the meat finishes where the guests are.
That is what the nine mobile units and a crew of up to thirty are for: a full line, set up on your ground, serving inside the two-hour window our standard service covers.
What 29 miles north actually means
Reno sits outside what our printed terms call our immediate area, so a travel fee is added. It goes into the quote rather than onto the end of it, and what it pays for is the whole kit making the trip: the Southern Pride rotisserie on its twenty-foot trailer, the tents, the grills, the warmers, the serving line and a crew big enough to run all of it.
The run north goes through the Washoe Valley wind gap, which is the one stretch of this route with any say in the day's schedule. Reno itself sits a few hundred feet lower than Carson City, so nothing about the cook has to change the way it does up at lake level. Give us the gate time and the load-in point and the crew works backwards from there.
Which service fits an event up here
Full service, most of the time. The published minimums are 20 people for drop-off and pick-up and 40 for a full cater — but a drop-off at this distance means food leaving Carson City finished and riding 29 miles before anybody eats it, which is the one thing this outfit exists not to do. When the cooker comes with us, the ribs coming off the rack are the ribs going onto the plate.
Under 40 people, call before you decide rather than after. Travel fees apply to drop-offs as well as to full caters, and that is usually the fact that settles the question one way or the other.
What we usually suggest here
Full-service catering
20-person minimum for drop-off and pick-up · 40-person minimum for a full cater. Every event is quoted individually.
Travel fees are added to caters outside our immediate area.
Tell us about your Reno date
Send the date, the site and a rough headcount — a park, a lawn or a parking lot is fine, and you do not need a kitchen. We will come back with a quote that has the travel fee in it rather than tacked onto the end of it.