EHG Traiteur

EHG Traiteur's own homepage runs a 3-card menu at the top of the page: Restaurant Vieux Bois, Restaurant Le Trinquet, and EHG Traiteur itself, each with an identical Discover, Menu and Book button. Click Book on either restaurant and you land on Zenchef, a live table-reservation system, seconds away from holding a Tuesday dinner slot. Click Book on the EHG Traiteur card and you land somewhere else entirely, a BookingShake enquiry link, because there is no table to reserve. It is a small thing to notice on a page built from one template, but it is an honest one: this caterer's own site cannot pretend booking a wedding reception works like booking a seat at its sister restaurant, so it quietly routes you to something else.

The 3 cards belong to the same operation. EHG Traiteur is billed on its own page as "the exclusive catering service of the École Hôtelière de Genève," Geneva's hotel management school, and the site's structured data confirms the 3 concepts share one legal entity: Restaurant Vieux Bois SA, dated to 2009, with a stated group headcount of 51 to 200 employees across all 3. All 3 also share the same Avenue de la Paix 12 address in the 1202 postal code, though Le Trinquet actually operates from Route des Acacias 43 in Carouge, a few kilometres away, under the same corporate umbrella. The school's own site names Vieux Bois specifically as a "restaurant d'application," where first-year students train in real conditions; nothing on EHG Traiteur's own pages makes the same claim about the catering side, so this listing doesn't either.

What the catering side does say about itself: it serves Geneva and 8 named neighbouring communes (Carouge, Pregny-Chambésy, Vernier, Veyrier, Chêne-Bougeries, Cologny, Lancy, Le Grand-Saconnex), plus, in its own words, "throughout the Lake Geneva region." One sentence on the page calls it "operational every day of the week," the next narrows that to a Monday-to-Friday, 8am-to-6pm response window for enquiries, an easy enough overlap to read past but worth flagging since both claims sit in the same paragraph. The named contact for a wedding enquiry is Lauriane Loursel, listed as EHG Traiteur's Responsable événementiel. Her printed number is +41 22 919 24 19, which is also the number in the page's footer address block alongside the traiteur@ehg.ch inbox. That is a different number from the one behind every clickable "call to book" button on the same page, +41 22 919 24 21, a discrepancy the site does not explain anywhere I could find.

The page prints a sample menu rather than a photo gallery: a starter of vitello tonnato with mandarin zest cream and Parmesan Reggiano, a tuna ceviche with coconut-passion leche de tigre, Swiss chicken breast glazed in a blueberry-vinegar teriyaki, cod with a Chasselas beurre blanc, and a lentil and chickpea dish sourced from Sauverny, a village just outside the city. The cheese course is credited to a named supplier, "Bruand," without further detail on who that is. None of it is priced, and no minimum guest count is published anywhere on the site, which is true of nearly every Swiss caterer and worth one sentence rather than a finding.

Mariage, filed under private events

EHG Traiteur also runs a dedicated wedding-catering page, and it reads like marketing copy dropped into a template: "each wedding is unique, like a harmonious melody," a caterer "renowned in the canton for its unique blend of tradition and innovation." Swap the noun and the same structure serves the site's cocktail-reception page almost sentence for sentence. What the page does show clearly is how EHG Traiteur classifies its own event types: a "private events" list of 5 (wedding, baptism, communion, birthday, wedding anniversary) and a "professional events" list that runs to 6 items here, ending at gala dinners and banquets. Open the site's general event-planning page instead and the same "EHG Traiteur" info box lists 10 professional-event categories, adding business breakfasts, business lunches, seminars, meeting-room rental and plain meetings, none of which appear in the wedding page's version of the same box. Both are the operator's own pages, both use the identical accordion widget, and neither one matches the other; a wedding still sits in the 5-item private list on both, which is the part that matters for this listing.

The ceremony itself happens somewhere else

The one page on this domain worth reading closely before booking anything is the general wedding-planning guide, and its most useful sentence has nothing to do with catering. It states plainly that in Geneva, weddings are legally celebrated in the marriage hall of whichever civil-registry district the couple is assigned to, naming as an example the hall in the former town hall of the Eaux-Vives commune, now home to the city's Civil Status Department. For a couple planning from abroad, that single sentence does more work than the rest of the page combined: it says outright that the legal act happens at a commune office, not at Vieux Bois's terrace or wherever EHG Traiteur sets a buffet table, and the caterer's job starts once that formality is done. The rest of the planning page is generic wedding-blog material, Pinterest boards for theme inspiration, dance-floor sizing, how to brief a DJ, none of it specific to Geneva or to this business, and it reads that way.

The site itself is fully bilingual: every page checked here has a complete, separately maintained English version, down to the sample menu and the staff directory, not a machine-translated stub. That is a real signal that English-speaking enquiries are expected. It is not the same as a stated claim that planning calls, contracts or the day itself run in English, since nothing on the site says so either way.

A school-run kitchen, not a solo caterer

Judged against a typical small Geneva caterer, EHG Traiteur's advantage is institutional rather than boutique: a named events contact backed by a hospitality school's kitchens, a stated reach across 8 communes and the wider Lake Geneva basin, and a menu built around plated courses with real ingredient sourcing rather than a generic buffet list. Its weaknesses sit in the same pages: the dedicated wedding copy is thin and interchangeable with its own cocktail page, its own event-category lists disagree with each other, and 2 different phone numbers appear for what should be one enquiry line. None of that suggests a business struggling to operate, it suggests a busy institutional site where marketing content gets templated faster than it gets proofread. For a couple who wants the backing of an established culinary school rather than a one-person outfit, and who will pick up the phone to sort out the details the website leaves loose, EHG Traiteur is a reasonable Geneva shortlist entry. Anyone who wants a published price band or a firm guest minimum before making that call will need to ask Lauriane Loursel directly, because the site will not tell them.