How many glasses should I hire per head?

Between two and a half and three for a reception of a couple of hours, and more if you are pouring several drinks that each need their own shape. People put a glass down and take a new one, which is the whole reason the ratio is not one. Hiring short is a false economy, because a shortage mid-event cannot be fixed while unused clean glasses simply travel back in the crate.

Is it cheaper to return the glassware dirty?

It depends on the supplier and it is always worth asking, because the two models are priced differently. Return-dirty adds a per-item cleaning charge but saves you a sink, several hours of labour and the breakage that happens during washing up at midnight. Above roughly fifty guests, return-dirty is usually the better total once you value the time honestly.

What power does a reception need in an office building?

More than one circuit in a meeting room usually offers. Bottle coolers, hot water urns and coffee machines all draw heavily, and three of them on the same socket ring will trip it. Ask the building manager for the available load and the socket positions, and spread the heavy items. This is a building question, not a booking-desk question.

Do I need a licence to serve drinks at a company reception?

A closed company event in a hired room is treated differently from a public bar, but the rules on serving alcohol, on temporary catering and on events open to the public are set locally and should not be assumed. If the event is ticketed, open to the public, or outdoors on public ground, confirm the current requirements with the city authority and with the venue well before the date.

Catering kit hire for a reception in the banking district

Hiring the equipment for a reception is arithmetic plus two services nobody quotes for. How many glasses per head really means three, why the serving counter decides the layout, what power an office floor can actually give you, and whether returning the crates dirty is worth the surcharge.

A reception for a hundred people on an upper floor in the banking district, six until nine, drinks and something on a tray. It sounds like a catering order. Half of it is a logistics order: crates of glassware, two coolers, a dozen high tables and somebody who can get all of it into a lift before the guests do.

Frankfurt runs thousands of these evenings a year and they are not spread evenly. They cluster in the weeks before the winter holidays and in the evenings attached to the spring and autumn fairs, and in those weeks the hire stock behaves exactly like the room you are holding it in — finite, and priced by the hall calendar rather than by the season.

The arithmetic

Item	Per 100 guests, two to three hours	Note
Wine and water glasses	250–300	Two and a half to three per head, always
Sparkling glasses	120–150 if poured on arrival	Only if you are actually serving it
Beer glasses	80–120 if beer is offered	A separate shape, not a substitute
High tables	12–14	One per seven or eight people standing
Serving counter	1 per 60–70 guests	The queue forms here; plan the room around it
Bottle coolers or tubs	2–3	Ice is ordered separately and it melts
Trays	8–10	Always short, always cheap
Bins with lids	4–6	The building will not supply enough
Table cloths	1 per table plus a fifth	Marked ones get changed halfway through

The line that changes the room is the counter. One serving point for a hundred people produces a queue down the middle of the space and an empty far end. Two smaller points at opposite ends move the same volume with no queue at all, and the difference in cost is one counter hire.

Power, water and the building

An office floor is not a kitchen, and the gap shows up in three places.

Power. Coolers, urns and coffee machines are heavy draws. Ask the building for the load and the socket positions before you order, and spread the equipment across circuits rather than across the room.

Water and waste. Most hired rooms have a kitchenette with a domestic sink. That is enough for a coffee break and nowhere near enough for a reception. If you are washing anything, you need a real sink; if you are not, you need somewhere for dirty crates that is not the corridor.

Access. Deliveries arrive on pallets or in roll cages and have to reach your floor. Find out whether there is a goods lift, what hours it runs, and whether an evening delivery needs the building manager present. In the towers around the Taunusanlage and Opernplatz, out-of-hours access is a security question before it is a logistics one, and the answer can take a week to obtain.

Folded counters, stacked panels and carpet tiles lined up on a hard floor in a wide hall aisle before an event build. — Reception kit arrives flat and stacked, like everything else here. The bottleneck is rarely the van; it is the lift.

Return clean or return dirty

Every firm offers one, most offer both, and the difference is larger than the price list suggests.

Return clean means you wash, dry and repack into the correct crates. It is cheaper per item. It also means two people at a sink from ten until midnight, breakage during the washing up, and crates packed badly enough that the return count gets disputed three weeks later.

Return dirty adds a per-item cleaning charge. You scrape, stack and repack, and the crates go back as they are. Above about fifty guests this is usually the better total, and it removes the worst hour of the evening for whoever is left.

Either way, glassware is counted on return and breakage is billed at replacement. Expect to lose a few. Count what goes out so you have something to argue with about what comes back.

On a stand, the rules change

The same equipment appears on a stand at the exhibition grounds, but everything around it is different. Power comes from the hall order rather than a wall socket, a water and waste connection is a separate and expensive item, and cleaning is charged per stand per night. Coffee machines on stands are universal and almost always underpowered for the traffic they get by Wednesday.

If the reception is on a stand, order the equipment with the rest of the stand furniture so it arrives inside the same delivery slot. A separate two-crate delivery into a hall during a fair is an expensive way to move glassware.

Outside, on the river

Receptions on the Mainufer and on the terraces along both banks are a Frankfurt habit from May to September, and they add two problems: there is no power, and there is a permission. Generators, water containers and battery lighting all hire easily. The permission does not, and it is the thing to settle first. Rules for using public riverside ground, for amplified sound and for serving anything at all are set by the city and vary by location — see event spaces on the Main for the shape of it, and confirm the current position with the authority rather than with the caterer.

What to over-order

Trays, cloths, bins and ice. All four are cheap, all four run out, and none of them can be obtained at eight in the evening. Everything else can be rationed. Ice in particular is ordered by weight and vanishes faster than anyone expects in a warm room in September, when the building’s cooling has already been turned down for the autumn and nobody can turn it back up for one evening.