June and July are the months when, every year, I experience fine dining from what many might regard as the most unlikely source – contract caterers.
An evening opera at Glyndebourne includes a choice of three restaurants each offering a menu which many of the fashionable restaurants would find hard to beat, even with their star chefs and their wonderful and regular imaginative PR promotions. And the caterer is none other than the Compass Group, the world's largest industrial and commercial contract caterer which serves meals daily in over 50 countries yet still has its Head Office in Chertsey, Surrey. Compass is one of Britain's great success stories yet few people know about it. The meals – both afternoon teas and evening dining during an interval in the programme – are all part of our unique English lifestyle in the Sussex countryside..
The following week my wife and I joined a Thames evening dinner cruise with Bateaux London. That was another superb meal – perfect service, a delightful modern cuisine and excellent wine, this time from Europe's second biggest contract caterer, Sodexo. Dining on either the Harmony or Symphony French style bateaux includes the traditional nightclub atmosphere with a small group playing throughout the cruise while one sees the rapidly changing waterfront of the Thames from Westminster to Greenwich. Sodexo is a French company operating in 40 countries and I still remember an excellent salad lunch at one of its outlets in Brazil some years ago. Last week I missed the the sailing of their Harmony boat due to a fire at Somerset House gridlocking the roads nearby. Bateaux London kindly found stopping traffic in nearby Aldwych, but they found us a table on the next sailing of the Symphony an hour later. Customer service at its best.