Do You Need Power for Pizza Catering, and Can You Cook Indoors?

It depends on where we are cooking, and this is the part most caterers gloss over.

Outdoors, you need no mains power. The oven carries its own fuel: gas as standard, or a wood-fired oven brought in if that is the effect you want. Our whole outdoor rig is self-contained: we bring the oven, the fuel, prep tables, dough and toppings, and pack everything down afterwards. All the venue provides is a firm, level area of about 3m x 3m and reasonable vehicle access. Many garden and dry-hire venues have no usable outdoor power, which is exactly why that matters.

Indoors, you do need power. A gas or wood-fired oven cannot run in a room, so an indoor booking is cooked on an electric oven, which we hire in for the occasion, and an electric oven needs a mains supply at the venue. That is a real requirement, not a formality, and it is worth checking before you book a room.

Open air, or a well-ventilated covered space. It runs very hot, around 400-450°C, and has to vent that heat, so it cannot go in a sealed indoor room at any price. In practice that means a garden, courtyard, terrace, driveway, car park or an open-sided marquee. We need safe clearance from people, tents and anything combustible, which forms part of the fire risk assessment we can provide for venue sign-off. What it does not need is a single cable from your venue.

When a venue is fully indoors, a hall, an office, a restricted hotel space, we bring in an electric oven. It is the only kind that can cook in a room, and it is the answer wherever a fire policy rules out an open flame. You still get the same Neapolitan-style pizza, cooked to order in front of guests; the heat source changes and so does one line on the checklist, because that oven runs on the venue's mains supply.

Because the electric oven is arranged for the occasion rather than living in the van, tell us early: which room, and where can we plug in? We will confirm what the oven draws and agree the setup with you or the venue before you commit. For how the fuel choice affects the pizza itself, see our wood-fired vs gas comparison.

Here's what we bring versus what the venue provides:

Water is not normally needed either way, we arrive prepped. If a particular setup needs water we will agree it with you in advance.

Outdoors, because we do not depend on your venue's power or kitchen, your options open right up: fields, gardens, courtyards, car parks and open-sided marquees all become viable. That is a big part of why couples and event planners choose a mobile pizza van over a fixed-kitchen option. Indoors the question narrows to one thing, whether the room can give us a mains supply, and almost every hall, office, barn conversion and hotel space can. One case sits in between: an outdoor space that bans an open flame, a rooftop terrace being the usual one. Tell us and we will say honestly what we can run there rather than guess. Either way we cater up to 400 guests across the areas we cover: London, Kent, Essex, Surrey, Hertfordshire and Sussex.