Begert Catering

Begert Catering's own site sums up its range in one line, repeated at the bottom of every page on the domain: "Du planst einen Apéro, Businesslunch, Kongress, Geburtstag, Hochzeit oder ein Mittagessen auf der Baustelle." You're planning an apéro, a business lunch, a congress, a birthday, a wedding, or a lunch on a construction site. A wedding sits in that list between a birthday party and a meal served to a building crew, and that placement says more about how this Bern kitchen actually works than any adjective could. The same line goes on to promise "unsere Flexibilität ist deine Stärke," our flexibility is your strength, but the sentence before it is the useful part: a caterer whose everyday business already runs from office lunches to job-site meals has the transport, the staffing and the kitchen logistics worked out long before a wedding booking ever comes in. Begert has traded in Bern since 1995, the founding year given on both its homepage and its About page, and a wedding here is simply the largest and most formal item on an order form built for a much wider range of occasions.

The company runs from 2 named premises rather than one central kitchen: the "Koch-Werkstatt" at Murtenstrasse 143a in Bern, and a second site called "Atelier" at Birkenweg 9 in Muntelier, near Murten. Both addresses appear on every page's footer, alongside a Bern landline and an info@ email address, so a couple has a physical place to visit before committing to a quote rather than only a contact form.

An order form built from 6 modules, not a fixed wedding package

Begert does not sell a wedding package with a name and a brochure. It sells what the site calls a "Baukastensystem," a modular system built so a client can decide individually which parts Begert should handle. The 6 modules are Essen (food), Getränke (drinks), Equipment, Deko, Location, and Personal & Transport, and a couple can hand over as many or as few as they want, keeping the rest in their own hands. The process starts online or by phone with a description of the event, after which Begert issues what it calls a "massgeschneidertes unverbindliches Angebot," a custom, non-binding quote. There is no fixed per-person wedding price published anywhere on the site. That is normal for a Swiss caterer working this way rather than a gap specific to Begert, and it is not treated here as a finding in itself.

What is fixed is who Begert will take on at all. The kitchen caters from 25 people upward, Monday to Saturday, with Sunday available only on request. Within that floor, the minimum guest count varies by service style: 25 PAX for "Auf die Hand" finger food and for the plated "Am Tisch" service (simple menus, seasonal 3-course menus, tavolata, tea time, desserts), and 35 PAX for the "Am Buffet" line, which covers 4 named buffet styles: Venus, BBQ, Szenen, and a vegetarian buffet called Chabis & Rüebli. A wedding under 25 guests is, in other words, outside what this kitchen normally takes on. The site also describes an "Apéro Riche" format built to replace a sit-down lunch or dinner entirely, which is worth knowing for a couple planning a shorter or more informal wedding day.

The "Koch-Werkstatt" page frames the kitchen's own approach in a short line of its own: "Kochen erfordert eine gewisse Konzentration, eine gewisse Liebe, eine zärtliche Aufmerksamkeit," cooking takes a certain concentration, a certain love, a tender attention. Behind that line sits a specific claim about sourcing rather than a general one: the page says staff visit producers on their farms, help out at dairies and butcheries, and visit the baker early in the morning, described as inspiration for the kitchen's own dishes rather than as outsourced production.

A farm childhood and a veterinary apprenticeship, not a shared career path

The About page calls its 3-person leadership team "die drei Musketiere," the three musketeers: Christine Begert, the owner, whose title on the page reads "Eidg. Dipl. Hotelier/Restaurateur HF SHL & Eventmanager"; Guido Krämer, the head chef; and Stefanie Scirocco, the event manager. Neither woman's own biography describes a straight line into catering. Begert's page says she grew up on her parents' farm with 2 brothers, helping with planting, harvest and the animals, until her grandfather told her the barn was no place for a girl and she started helping her mother in the kitchen instead, where she found she loved cooking. She trained as a cook, then went through the Hotelfachschule Luzern hotel management school, before gaining experience with established restaurateurs and in 5-star hotels. Her family's farm is still active, and she still visits and brings back fresh produce and her mother's home-baked "Zopf."

Scirocco's own page describes an even less direct route into the business: she originally trained toward veterinary practice work, moved into gastronomy through a personal relationship, trained at Schloss Schadau in Thun, joined the NOA Restaurant in 2016, and began supporting Begert at events on the side, a sideline that grew into her running the events herself.

What actually reaches the table

The plated, buffet and finger-food menus name real dishes rather than generic categories. "Am Tisch" lists items such as burrata with Bernese roses, Solothurn wine soup, vine-leaf parcels, veal saddle "vom Beefer 800°C" (seared on an 800°C grill), snails, saltimbocca and a vanilla mille-feuille. The buffet line runs to Engadine ham sliced fresh from the machine, Ringgenberg perch from Lake Brienz, and tomahawk roastbeef carved from a sword. Finger food ("Auf die Hand") includes mini bagels with salmon, soup shots, prawns in panko, black Angus burgers in a brioche bun, bruschetta, and cold cuts and cheese boards. A couple wanting to push a menu further can add specific upgrades the site names directly: table-side searing at 800°C, a champagne tower, and oysters opened fresh in front of the guest. A separate drinks list, "Keller," covers wine, beer, cocktails, spirits and non-alcoholic options with general pairing guidance, but no producer, vintage or price is named anywhere on that page.

No wedding page, no wedding price, and a site that never left German

Here is the gap that matters most for a couple reading this from outside Switzerland. Across every page checked on the domain, the word "Hochzeit" appears exactly once, inside that one repeated tagline. There is no dedicated wedding page, no wedding photo gallery, no wedding-specific menu, and no wedding price published anywhere else on the site. What Begert does publish prices for is corporate seminars: 3 fixed packages, Bronze at CHF 59 per person for a 6-hour event, Silver at CHF 89 for 8 hours, and Gold at CHF 109 for 10 hours, every one of them requiring at least 40 people and aimed explicitly at business day-events rather than weddings.

The site is also entirely in German. Its page code stamps an English language tag by default, which is a WordPress setting rather than a real translation, and every visible sentence checked here, from the homepage to the terms pages to the menus, is in German. There is no English toggle and no separate English section in the sitemap. Nothing on the site says the team cannot run a call, a tasting or the wedding day itself in English, since none of the pages address the question either way, but a couple planning from abroad should expect the quote, the contract and the day-to-day correspondence to run in German unless they ask otherwise up front.

The clauses worth reading before a deposit changes hands

Begert's live terms page and its downloadable 2024 conditions document agree on the numbers that actually govern planning a date. A quote stays valid for 30 days. Once an order is confirmed, a couple has 3 working days to flag any discrepancy before it becomes binding. The final guest count is due at least 5 working days before the event, and a later reduction is still billed at the confirmed number. Cancelling costs more the closer it lands to the date: 30 days out, Begert can charge 100 percent of confirmed staffing and 100 percent of confirmed equipment, disposables excluded; between 14 and 7 working days out, that becomes 75 percent of the whole order including drinks; inside 6 working days, it is 100 percent of the order. For larger events, the terms also reserve Begert's right to ask for an advance payment, though no percentage or trigger point for that is published. Any outside supplier a couple wants, a band, a tent company, an artist, is arranged through Begert but contracted directly between the couple and that supplier, not through Begert itself.

One thing is worth flagging rather than quietly resolving: Begert's own live terms page and its 2024 conditions PDF do not agree with each other on the hourly staffing rate or on what delivery costs outside Bern, and both documents are current and both are the operator's own. The safer approach is to ask for the exact figure in writing rather than budgeting against either published number.

A client list built from offices, an optician and a car dealership

The testimonials Begert publishes are corporate, not bridal. Reviewers named on the site include Kultur Hof in Köniz, EMCH Aufzüge, a lift company, in Bern, Leist Optik in Herzogenbuchsee, whose review references the optician's own 5-year anniversary event that Begert catered, GVB Privatversicherungen at Papiermühlestrasse 130 in Ittigen, and the P791 The Car Residence dealership in Belp. None of the published reviews are from a wedding client, which matches the picture the rest of the site paints: a business whose visible reputation was built on office lunches and corporate events, with weddings running through the same quote process but without a review or a gallery of their own yet.

Alongside catering, Begert also rents out event infrastructure under a section called "Rahmen und Ambiente," but only as an add-on to a food and drink order, not as a standalone hire: tableware, glassware and linen; bars, tables and lounge furniture; catering equipment down to a hot-dog machine and a deep-fat fryer; and lighting, sound and video equipment for the event itself. The site does not maintain a list of specific venues it recommends, though it offers to help a couple find one in and around Bern.

For a couple who wants a Bern caterer whose everyday business already stretches from office lunches to job-site meals, and who is comfortable working through a written quote rather than a fixed wedding menu, Begert is a credible option: founded in 1995, still taking bookings from 25 guests upward, and closing only for its own published breaks, from 12 July to 2 August 2026 and again from 20 December 2026 to 3 January 2027. What is worth confirming directly before booking is exactly what the website leaves open: whether the team is comfortable running the day itself in English, and which of its 2 disagreeing internal documents actually governs the staffing rate and the delivery charge that ends up on the invoice.