Maiergrill

Maiergrill's homepage states plainly that "an 365 Tagen im Jahr" (365 days a year) it caters weddings, birthday parties, christenings and other private events alongside company anniversaries, roadshows and staff parties, for gatherings running from 20 guests to "weit über 1'000" (well over 1,000). Nothing on the catering hub, the pricing page, the FAQ or the wedding-specific page names an exception to that claim: no closed week over Christmas, no stated blackout around peak wedding weekends, nothing at all. That doesn't mean the company can turn a wedding around on short notice, though. The same pricing page recommends booking a wedding or large event 4 to 12 months out and says a written quote usually follows within 24 hours of the first phone call. Year-round availability, on Maiergrill's own site, describes when the company will work, not how much lead time it needs.

The name is also the method. Maiergrill built its business around a smoke-free grill it calls the "weltweit ersten rauchfreien Grill" (the world's first smoke-free grill), a vertical, propane-fired rig whose skewers cook through on a timer adjustable from 4 to 12 minutes and come off roughly every 7 minutes on the Maiergrill Rondo, the model it says it uses most for rentals, rated at 80 skewers an hour. Because nothing drips onto an open flame, the company says the unit runs indoors as readily as outdoors and needs as little as 200 watts on an ordinary 220-volt outlet; where there's no power at all, it brings a generator.

Almost everything reaches the plate freshly cooked in front of guests rather than arriving pre-made. The FAQ names the exceptions specifically: salad dressing and dessert creams are prepared ahead of time; meat, fish, seafood, vegetables, fruit and even the bread, finished baking half an hour before the meal, are grilled or cooked à la minute. For weddings, that has stretched from a sit-down meal for 20 people after a registry-office ceremony to what the company calls a 300-guest "Celebrity-Hochzeit," and from a fully wired hall to an igloo at 2,727 metres above sea level or a hay barn with nothing but cold water and a single socket.

The company dates itself to 1996 (its footer copyright starts a year later, in 1997, a small gap the site never explains) and says it has been an event caterer for over 30 years, running roughly 600 events of every kind a year and, on its wedding page specifically, more than 100 weddings a year. Its founder, Andreas Maier, is credited by name as the expert the Sonntagszeitung and Le Matin have quoted on grill event catering. The company runs 6 locations: Winterthur, its German-Switzerland head office; Rossens, near Fribourg, its French-Switzerland head office; plus Zürich, Gränichen in Aargau, Basel and Lausanne. Both legal entities behind it, Maiergrill AG and Maiergrill (Romandie) SA, are described on the pricing page as fully licensed and insured, with product and public liability cover and accident insurance for staff.

The grill cooks live, and a vegetarian sister brand covers what it can't

By Maiergrill's own figure, meat and fish make up around 20 percent of what its grill-led menu serves; a wedding that wants mostly vegetarian or vegan food gets pointed instead to wave.catering, a no-grill sister concept launched in 2020 that the company says runs around 90 percent vegetarian and vegan across a range of "over 30" dishes, 17 of them vegetarian and 10 vegan by its own count. Inside the Maiergrill format itself, the FAQ offers a 6-vegetable main-course buffet and asks only that a couple flag expected vegetarian numbers in advance. Nothing on the site addresses gluten, dairy, halal or kosher requirements, so none of that is claimed here either.

The 2 venues it owns, and why it argues against caterer-exclusive ones

Maiergrill runs 2 venues of its own that double as recommended wedding locations: Rote Trotte in Winterthur, which its own marketing credits with a Swiss Location Award and lists at 20 to 100 guests, and the Zehntenhaus beside Schloss Elgg, billed on the homepage as a "Premium Hochzeitslocation." Beyond those 2, its published Eventlocation directory names further partner sites with stated capacities: Château de la Sarraz in Vaud (up to 180 guests), a greenhouse venue near Kloten (50 to 300), Domaine des Râpes near Fribourg (20 to 120) and Halle 1 at Forum Fribourg (up to 1,300). The wedding page's own regional index claims coverage across Aargau, Basel, Bern, Fribourg, Graubünden, Lucerne, Schaffhausen, the St. Gallen Rhine Valley, Zürich and French-speaking Switzerland, and the company notes it is also recommended by the third-party site deine-hochzeitslocation.ch.

On the same Eventlocations page, Maiergrill argues openly against venues that hand catering to one exclusive partner, a practice its own copy labels a "Cateringmonopol," and recommends couples pick a venue with open caterer choice instead. It draws an exception: at protected historic buildings such as listed castles or manor houses, the company says accreditation agreements, which set out rules a caterer has to respect, are a reasonable way for an owner to vet who works in the space, and it presents itself as an accredited regular at several such addresses.

What CHF 30 to over CHF 500 a head actually buys

Most Swiss wedding suppliers won't put a number on a page. Maiergrill breaks its own per-person cost into 7 lines: food (CHF 15 to 100), drinks (CHF 10 to 100), service staff (CHF 0 to 60), tableware and decor (CHF 0 to 60), the venue itself (CHF 0 to 130), grill infrastructure (CHF 5 to 20) and furniture (CHF 0 to 50). Its own answer to what a quoted price includes names food, drinks, the grill itself, its equipment and staff as standard; tableware, cutlery, glassware, linens, decor, furniture and a tent are named as optional add-ons billed separately. The pricing page totals those lines into a per-person range of CHF 30 to over CHF 500; its FAQ, answering a differently worded version of the same question elsewhere on the same page, gives CHF 30 to over CHF 200 instead. Neither page reconciles them, so both are printed here rather than resolved into one.

The pricing page also walks through one worked example: a 100-guest corporate full-service event with a drinks package, 1 event manager, 2 assistants and 3 service staff (6 staff in total) comes out around CHF 105 a head excluding Swiss VAT, or CHF 114 including the 8.1 percent rate, for a total near CHF 10,500 before tax. It breaks that down as 56 percent food and drink, 21 percent rented infrastructure, 20 percent staff and 3 percent transport and logistics. The same page says explicitly that Maiergrill publishes no standard package or menu price list, because every quote is built after a phone consultation; nothing on the site describes a tasting, so that step isn't claimed here either. On payment, a deposit secures the date and the balance is invoiced after the event; cancellation fees are described as staged by how close to the date a couple cancels, but the actual amounts sit in the individual contract, not on the site.

Grill mieten: the same recipe, minus the crew

Couples who want to run the grill themselves can rent it without staff, either delivered or picked up, though self-pickup only works at 2 of the 6 locations, Winterthur and Rossens-Fribourg, both described as 3 minutes from a motorway exit. 5 service tiers sit between that and full service, moving from collect-everything-yourself up through delivery with a grill operator to a full event team, and the company says it takes cleaning back in-house as standard rather than leaving it to the renter. One thing isn't optional: the site is explicit that the grill can't be rented without also renting the skewers, since it wants the food and the machine to perform as a pair.

Between a 30-year track record, a genuinely detailed price breakdown and a smoke-free grill that solves the indoor-and-bad-weather problem other outdoor caterers can't, Maiergrill reads as a caterer that has thought hard about removing a couple's uncertainty on the parts it controls. What it won't do is meet a small, intimate wedding: 20 guests is a hard floor, priced in from the start because the fixed costs don't work below it. And for everything it publishes about cost, its own conflicting total-price ranges are a reminder to ask for the actual number rather than trust either one on its own.