How Many Guests We Can Serve

up to 400 guests for the Loaded Bar and up to 300 for Loaded Stations.

Those are event capacities and worth reading as such. A lot of catering pages quote a rate per hour, which sounds similar and means something different: a truck that serves 150 an hour is telling you a 400-guest event will take most of the evening. Ours is a single service. Our lines go just as fast as any normal buffet, and the buffet stays open afterward for seconds. When you send an inquiry, we'll give you an estimate of how long it will take to serve your guests.

Why the two numbers differ

The Loaded Bar takes more people because a buffet line is a single moving queue. Guests walk past, staff top each plate, and the whole room clears in one pass.

Loaded Stations tops out lower because each guest has a short conversation about what they want. That is the appeal of it, and it is also the reason it moves at a different pace. Loaded Truck sits in the same range as Stations for the same reason.

Loaded Stations

Serving stations set up inside your venue. You pick four entrees off the menu and choose potato, pasta or both. Guests walk up, say what they want, and watch it built. Up to 300 guests.

Loaded Truck

The same four entrees you picked, ordered at the trailer window and handed over a minute or two later. The trailer ends up being part of the event. People like watching the window.

Loaded Bar

The buffet. You pick three proteins, two toppings and three sauces. Potato and pasta go out in bulk, guests walk the line, and our staff top each plate as it passes. Up to 400 guests.

Guest count as a way of picking a format

For most events the count decides the format on its own.

  • Above 300. The Loaded Bar, because it is the format built for a room that size.
  • Under 300, everyone eating at once. Any of the three. Pick on how you want the room to feel rather than on throughput.
  • Under 300, arriving across hours. Loaded Truck or Loaded Stations, because there is no queue to build and the last arrival gets food as fresh as the first.

That third case is the one people underestimate. A company picnic or a graduation open house spreads arrivals over three or four hours, and cooking to order handles that far better than a set-piece buffet does.

Small events

Whether a twenty-guest event works comes down to where the truck already is that day. It is always worth asking.

The truck is usually already out somewhere on any given day, selling to the public. Where it is that afternoon, and how far that is from you, changes what is possible in the evening. You cannot work that out from outside. That is why the answer is a phone call rather than a threshold on a web page.

Large events

At the top of the range the questions stop being about food and start being about space. Serving points need tables, tables need room behind them for staff, and a queue of 400 people needs somewhere to stand that is not the dance floor.

  • One 8-foot table for every two serving points, with at least 3 feet of clear space behind it for staff. Tablecloths welcome if you want them.
  • A rough potato-versus-pasta split about 14 days out. An estimate is fine.
  • Plates and utensils, if you would rather supply your own. We can also provide them for a fee, and you pick which way at booking.

More serving points means a faster room. If your venue can give us the tables, we will use them.

When you need a firm number

Later than most people assume. A rough count at booking is enough to hold a date. About a week before the event we confirm your final guest count, your entree picks and the serving time. A rough potato-versus-pasta split comes about two weeks out, and an estimate is genuinely fine there.

Counts move in the last fortnight at every event that has ever happened. Ours is built to absorb that, because the food is made as guests order rather than portioned in advance.

Working out your event

Tell us the date, the town, a rough headcount and the time you want food going out. Call 931-271-7455 or email nicholas@itsloaded.com.

What each format involves is on the catering page, what a quote contains is in what catering costs, and weddings have their own version of all of this in wedding catering.