Franky's BBQ

The page this listing points to exists for one purpose: the word "Hochzeit" (wedding) appears on it 23 separate times, and nothing else on the site gets that kind of dedicated treatment. Franky's BBQ is not a restaurant with a catering arm bolted on. It is a fleet of converted vehicles, run out of Unterdorfstrasse in Blauen, a village in canton Basel-Landschaft, since 2017, by a couple who give only their first names on the site, Jasmin and Franky. Every other caterer in this category sends a kitchen team and a van. This one sends the kitchen itself, built into the vehicle, and parks it wherever the wedding is happening.

The fleet is where the site's own copy gets a little tangled, which is worth stating plainly rather than picking a number and moving on. The wedding page describes "3 lovingly restored vintage food trucks and 2 smokers, one of them a unique fire-engine vehicle of the Primus brand." The separate event-catering page describes the same fleet as "3 beautiful vintage food trucks and 1 Primus-brand fire-tanker vehicle, lovingly converted into a smoker," with no second smoker mentioned at all. A third page, an orphaned "Die Flotte" (The Fleet) page reachable only through the sitemap and not linked from the site's own navigation, names 5 individual vehicles by nickname: AMG, Haribo, Primus, Texas XXL and Cube. AMG, it says, started life as a DPD delivery van, built up from scratch including its own side panels. 2 of the vintage trucks are separately identified elsewhere as Citroën HY vans, which the services page singles out by name as the fleet's standout eye-catchers. Whatever the exact final count, this is plainly more than one truck with a grill bolted to the side: it is a small collection of restored vehicles, at least one of them converted from an actual fire-fighting tanker into a smoker, that gets deployed according to what an event needs.

Power, level ground, and a silence on water

The wedding page itself talks about atmosphere and flavour and says nothing about logistics, so the real answer to what an outdoor booking requires sits in the operator's own AGB, the general terms and conditions. It is specific in a way the marketing copy is not. The client has to make sure "the required installations (power, a level, stable surface) are present," and Franky's BBQ specifies both the plug type and the electrical connection its equipment needs, because equipment running on insufficient voltage will not work properly. If the site turns out to be difficult or impossible to service on the day because the infrastructure or the location was not adequate, the client still owes the full order value plus any extra costs, even if the catering ends up only partial, or does not happen at all. Parking for the vehicle or vehicles has to be arranged and any parking fees are billed on. What the terms never mention, anywhere, is water. There is no hookup requirement listed for it, which either means the trucks carry what they need or means it simply is not written down; the site does not say which. There is also no weather-cover clause of any kind, no tent, no marquee, no rain contingency offered as part of the service. The only weather-related language in the whole document is a liability shield: Franky's BBQ is not responsible for delays or disruption caused by "force majeure (storm, earthquake, breakdowns, etc.)," and the client cannot deduct anything from the bill on that basis. Read together, the couple booking this truck is the party who has to think through the tent, not the caterer.

Weekday lunch stops, then a wedding on request

Wedding catering is not the only thing this business runs, and the rest of it is worth knowing because it shows a currently operating truck rather than a page built around a single kind of booking. 2 named trucks, Haribo and AMG, run a fixed Monday-to-Thursday lunch circuit at named stops: Haribo's own business park in Reinach, a UBS branch and the Basel-Landschaft cantonal finance and church-affairs office in Liestal, SKAN AG in Allschwil, the Hammering Mann stop in Basel, and the UZB dental teaching centre in Basel, each running from roughly 11:30 to between 13:00 and 13:30. The menu on those stops is dated to the actual calendar week at the time of writing, "Menu KW 32-33," and priced by the item: a 150g regional, bone-matured beef patty burger for CHF 16, a classic burger for CHF 12, fried potatoes for CHF 6, an organic alpine-herb iced tea for CHF 4, and a CHF 2 discount for ordering a drink with any meal. That is the everyday, walk-up side of the business. A wedding books a different, custom menu built around brisket, a beef patty and a veggie-burger option with sides and sauces to match, and nowhere on the site is that menu given a per-head price the way the lunch stops are. The 2 products share a kitchen and a fleet but not a price list, and a couple asking for a quote should expect the wedding menu to be negotiated fresh rather than read off a board.

The neighbours who supply the plate

The partner page names actual local businesses rather than a generic supplier logo wall, and 2 of them are personal: a wild-game butcher next door, Andreas Meury of Stachel Blauen, and a farm shop run by a named childhood friend of the founder, Roman at Mathis Hof, where the truck sources seasonal pumpkins and vegetables. A separate grill-equipment supplier, Bucher Gabele, also has a "Roman" credited with kitting the trucks out. Niederberger, a bakery, hand-shapes the rolls every morning, which the site describes as making each one slightly different. Metzgerei Schmidlin, a butcher in Wahlen, is described as trading since 1994. Packaging comes from Handelgrün, a Baselbiet supplier of ecological packaging that has its burger and fries boxes made in Switzerland. The same page carries badges for Swiss Meat, Swiss Bread, IP-Suisse and Suisse Garantie, which lines up with the menu page's own claim that only Swiss meat and bread are used, with any exception clearly marked. There is also a link out to a separate wedding-photography referral business, though no individual photographer is named on the page itself. None of this is a claim the write-up is making on the operator's behalf: it is a list of named, checkable partners, the kind of detail a caterer's own site rarely bothers to publish.

A cancellation ladder with real numbers on it

The terms carry a genuine cancellation ladder rather than a vague "fees may apply" line, and it is worth quoting because a couple planning from abroad will want to know it before signing anything. Cancelling 30 to 21 days before the event costs 10 percent of the last quote, with a minimum of CHF 500. Inside that, 20 to 15 days out costs 30 percent, 14 to 8 days costs 50 percent, and inside 7 days it rises to 70 percent. A postponement, rather than a cancellation, is free up to 21 days out; closer than that, Franky's BBQ sends a cost estimate for the move that the client has to accept in writing. A deposit is typically 50 percent of the calculated invoice, taken before the event, with the final, itemised bill due within 14 days of receipt. The first quote is free; a second one can carry a fee if no booking follows. The guest count a client locks in at least 14 working days out is what gets billed, and it cannot drop below 20 percent of that figure later, though it can rise for a surcharge. Any complaint about the food or service has to be raised during the event or within 24 hours after it, or the job counts as accepted. None of this is unusual for Swiss event catering, but it is unusually well documented for a business this size, and a couple booking from abroad gets an actual number to plan around rather than a promise to sort it out later.

A few things about the operator itself could not be fully pinned down, and it seemed more honest to say so than to smooth them over. Franky's BBQ describes itself as the first food truck in Switzerland to take first place in the "On the Move" category of the Best of Swiss Gastro award, a claim made on its own about page; the award's own website could not be reached by any method tried, including a direct fetch and a fetch of its robots file, so this write-up repeats the claim as the operator's own and nothing more. The Swiss federal commercial register turned up no entry for "Franky's BBQ GmbH," the exact name on the operator's own contract terms, under any spelling tried, though that is a negative search result rather than proof of anything either way. And the site itself runs entirely in German, with no English toggle, no hreflang tag and an enquiry form that asks for name, date and guest count in German only, so an English-speaking couple books this truck without knowing in advance whether the call to plan the menu will happen in a language they are comfortable in.

What the site gets right is harder to fake than a polished translation: a specific, working fleet with a genuine restoration story behind at least one of its vehicles, a named network of small regional suppliers rather than a stock-photo pantry, a documented set of terms that spells out exactly what a couple has to arrange on-site, and a weekday operation busy enough to be running a dated menu on the day this research was done. For a couple who wants their wedding catering to look and feel like an event rather than a hotel banquet, and who are prepared to sort out the power connection, the level ground and the weather plan themselves, this is a genuinely different kind of booking from every fixed-kitchen name in this category.