Survived my first event and lived to cook another day.

I signed up to cook for The County Sheriffs Department Command Staff's annual picnic. I was asked to provide a minimum of 3 meats and 2 hot sides for a total of 120 adults, and hot dogs for 30 kids. And they wanted me to cook onsite.

I expected problems of some kind... but everything went great. Food came out about as good as I can do, everything was hot and received good reviews.

The only real snag was timing... It seems EVERYONE that showed up wanted to check out the smokers and my Santa Maria Style Grill and ask about a million questions. How hot? How long? When did you start? Where did you buy the meat? What seasonings... and on and on.

If they would have all came up at the same time to ask t wouldnt have been so bad... But as one group would leave, new arrivals would head over and begin the interigation again...

With all that I was about 20 min late getting everything sliced, pulled, into serving trays, and to the buffet line...

Should I expect this at every event? How do you guys deal with this?

Thanks, guys. I followed your advise for my second catering gig and decided to embrace the Q&A from the curious in the crowd. Gave friendlier and more complete answer to questions, and even served up some early samples to the guys handing around my pit and prep tables.

It seemed to work in my favor and those who had the most questions before service seemed to be the most enthusiastic and complementary after eating my food.

I think I was overly stressed my first time, you know, wanting everything to be perfect, and I forgot to have fun and enjoy the experience of serving good food to great bunch of people. I actually had fun the 2nd time... Worked my butt off (no pun intended) but had a good time doing it.

Thanks for the advise.