Hog Roasts in Leicestershire

Keythorpe Event Catering & Hog Roasts, based in Leicestershire, share some of their insights on key information needed by event caterers, and hog roast specialists, when asked for a quote. Owning their own farm means they can tell you exactly where the pig for your spit roast has come from!

What do you need to know from an organiser in order to provide a comprehensive quote?

For us to provide a comprehensive quote to a customer, ideally we need the event date & time or times to eat, a brief explanation of the type of event they are hosting, the estimated number of guests, the potential venue, whether it's an indoor or outdoor event, access, parking, first floor. Always, make sure you have checked with the venue that you can use outside caterers and if there are any restrictions on electric, gas or open flame. Whilst we have some standard menus we regularly tailor a menu to individual requirements. It helps us greatly if you can tell us what ideas you have for food, even if you think something is not possible or out of your budget let us know, you may be surprised. Your maximum budget if you have one as budgets can vary wildly.

What advice would you give to a customer looking to hire a provider in your area of work?

Prices can vary widely with both portion size and quality of food - the cheapest is not always the best. Ask where they source their produce from. Our hogs come from our farm and our freshly baked bread rolls from our local bakery. They cost a little more but you can taste the difference, and if you are paying for professional catering you want the best on offer. It takes experience and good equipment to serve a good hog roast.

Please tell us a little bit about how and why you started the business.

Having raised livestock on our farm selling meat, sausages and dry cured bacon, we'd always dabbled in a little event catering selling our thick juicy burgers, bacon baps and sausage cobs, when we were approached by a client and asked for a hog roast for a birthday. We'd supplied hogs & lambs for others to roast but had never ventured into hog roasting ourselves, but we knew someone with a machine which we borrowed and since then we've never looked back. We've now expanded our repertoire considerably offering roasts, BBQ, a full range of homemade sides and salads as well as offering jackets potatoes, stone fired pizza, paella. What we absolutely love about catering is the face to face contact with our customers and hearing the great feedback both during service but also people come back afterwards to compliment us. It's a very rewarding business to be in.

Please tell us about a booking you've had through Add to Event, how did it go? Would you recommend us to others?

We had our first corporate family fun day booking through Add to Event. We offered our mini-festival menu that we've fine tuned over a number of years and tailored it to generously feed 200 expected guests. Just as well it was a generous amount of food, the sun was shining, the bar was flowing and around 100 extra guests turned up on the day! 300 plates left the pile and we still had people grabbing buns and filling them with freshly barbecued meat, pulled pork, taking food away on napkins. There was not much left over that day and the food was well received, as you can see, from the review written by Frances, on our listing.