Aurora, Colorado has a city-designated Korea Town along Havana Street — restaurants, grocery stores, and church communities that have grown steadily as Denver-metro's Korean-American population has expanded beyond the coasts. Walk into any of the well-known Korean restaurants along that corridor on a weeknight and you will see the dining room doing fine. Ask the owner how they handle a 60-person office lunch order for a company out in the Denver Tech Center, and the answer is usually the same: someone's cell phone, a text thread with a headcount that changed twice, and a handshake on price. Daily online ordering gets attention because delivery apps forced the issue. Catering — often the single highest-margin, highest-ticket order a Korean restaurant takes all month — is still running on 2005 technology at most places.
Catering is a different business hiding inside your restaurant
A dinner order and a catering order look similar on a receipt but behave completely differently. A dinner order is same-day, small, and low-risk if it falls through. A catering order is booked weeks ahead, ties up significant kitchen capacity and ingredient purchasing, and represents real financial exposure if the client cancels or the headcount is wrong. Treating both the same way — a phone number and a good memory — works until it does not, and it usually breaks on your busiest, highest-value orders.
What running catering without a real system actually costs:
- Lost inquiries — a potential client calls once, gets voicemail during dinner rush, and books the restaurant down the street that answered a web form instead.
- No deposit, no protection — a 50-person order gets confirmed on a phone call, ingredients get bought, and the client cancels the morning of with no financial consequence to them.
- Headcount and menu details lost in a text thread — 'can we do 45 instead of 40' and 'no shellfish for two people' get buried between other messages and never make it to the kitchen.
- Invisible to search — someone searching '한식 케이터링 덴버' or 'Korean catering Aurora CO' finds a competitor with an actual catering page and never learns your restaurant does catering at all.
- Corporate clients need paperwork you cannot produce fast — an office manager booking a company lunch usually wants a proper invoice or a W-9 on file, not a cash handshake, and a slow response loses the booking to whoever answers first.
Wiring catering into what you already have
None of this requires replacing your POS or building custom software. It requires putting three pieces in front of the client before the phone call: a catering menu with clear per-person or per-tray pricing, a short inquiry form that captures event date, headcount, and contact details the moment someone is interested, and a deposit link (Square Invoices or a simple Stripe payment link) that confirms the booking only once payment clears. Once a booking is confirmed, it goes into the POS as a scheduled catering ticket — Square, Toast, and Clover all support this in different ways — so the kitchen prep list, the accounting, and the calendar all draw from the same source instead of a manager's memory.
The order of operations we recommend:
- Publish a catering page with real pricing tiers (per person, per tray, minimum order size) — vagueness ("call for pricing") loses corporate clients who are comparing three vendors in one afternoon.
- Add an inquiry form that requires event date, headcount, and contact info before submission, emailed straight to whoever manages catering — not a general contact form that goes into a shared inbox nobody checks daily.
- Send a deposit invoice (20-50% is standard) as soon as details are confirmed, and treat the booking as tentative until it is paid.
- Enter the confirmed order into your POS as a scheduled ticket so kitchen staff see it on the same prep sheet as everything else, with enough lead time to order ingredients.
- Keep a simple shared calendar (even a Google Calendar) blocking off large catering commitments, so the kitchen never double-books its capacity on the same afternoon.
Reviews for catering clients need a different ask
A catering client is not a walk-in diner — they are often an office manager, an event planner, or a church committee member who books once but whose review carries real weight with other corporate and community buyers researching the same decision. A short, specific thank-you message after a catering event — sent by email once the invoice is settled — asking for a Google review works far better than hoping a one-time client remembers to leave one on their own. The same rule applies here as anywhere else: ask sincerely, never offer a discount in exchange, and reply to every review that comes in, since a future office manager comparing caterers reads those replies as closely as the stars.