Metzgerei Keller

The sign has read "Metzgerei Keller" since 1934, but the site itself cannot agree on who is actually in charge of the company behind it today. The Team page names Astrit Fejzi as Geschäftsführer, managing director. The Impressum, the one page on the site that carries legal weight, names someone else entirely for the same title: Raphael Travnicek, listed as the company's authorised signatory. Neither page mentions the other. Neither name is a Keller. Ownership left the family on 1 July 2017, when the business passed to HEBA Food Holding AG, a food-industry holding company based in Lenzburg, a move the company's own history page describes as an early succession plan rather than a sale under pressure. Before that date the line ran cleanly: founder Armin Keller bought a property in the fast-growing Manesse quarter and opened a butcher's shop there in 1934, his son Erich Keller rebuilt and enlarged the production floor between 1964 and 1968, and grandson Urs Keller took over in 1992 and grew the business to about 60 staff. The name over the door outlasted the family that built it, and the company's own paperwork hasn't fully caught up with what replaced them.

The physical footprint is smaller than that history suggests: a single shop, at a building the Impressum and the branch page both call Manesseplatz 88, though the same street number appears as Manessestrasse 88 in the contact block repeated on every page of the site, including that same Impressum page a few lines further down. Two different desks work out of that one address. A retail counter serves private customers, Monday to Friday 08:00 to 19:00 and Saturday 08:00 to 17:00, selling over the counter and through a nationwide online shop. A separate gastronomy sales office serves trade accounts on shorter hours, 07:00 to 16:00 on weekdays and 07:00 to 12:00 on Saturday, with its own phone line and its own inbox. A third retail point, a counter inside Jelmoli's food market, gets one passing mention on the quality-guarantee page and doesn't appear on the branch page at all.

What the company actually makes is the more settled part of the story. It sits in Wiedikon, Zürich's Kreis 3, at the foot of the Uetliberg, the neighbourhood that gave its name to the Wiedikerli, the Wiediker Rostbratwurst the company's own pages call the city's best-known sausage. Keller describes itself as one of the last city butcheries left in Zürich, still processing its own meat rather than buying in someone else's. The sourcing is broader than "local butcher" implies: Swiss Natura beef, veal and pork sit alongside imported Prime Beef named by origin, Black Angus from the US, bison from Canada, Hereford and Black Angus from Ireland, Wagyu from Australia's Jack's Creek, beef from Galicia in Spain, Kagoshima Wagyu from Japan, next to Swiss free-range poultry and French poultry specialities. The company says it delivers within the city by electric vehicle and hands its surplus to Too Good To Go, cutting its own food waste by roughly 50 percent.

Catering itself splits into 3 products, and they are not run the same way. Party-Service is food delivered or collected, no staff involved. The Grillparty Package is the same idea built around the grill and meat programme. Catering-Service, the only tier with people on site, is the one the site is most upfront about not owning outright: its own description says plainly that it runs "durch unsere professionellen und zuverlässigen Partner," through partners, not Keller's own crew. The kitchen work happens in-house, at the company's own production site; the staff who show up on the day are a subcontracted arrangement Keller brokers rather than employs. Nothing here uses the word Hochzeit, or wedding, in German or in English, anywhere on the site. The closest it comes to sorting occasions by type is its own enquiry form, which checks off 10 kinds of event, from BBQ Grillbuffet and Apéro to Business Lunch and Brunch, then routes everything else through a catch-all box marked Sonstiges.

Apéro at CHF 4 a piece, a steamer at CHF 1000 a day

What actually distinguishes this listing from most caterers in this category is that it publishes prices at all, and does so in unusual depth: a 21-page brochure, the same PDF linked 3 times under 3 different filenames, byte-for-byte identical each time. Open sandwiches for an apéro run CHF 4.00 to 4.60 a piece; small cold finger-food sets run CHF 12.00 for 4 pieces or 18.00 for 6, warm ones CHF 16.00 for 4 or 24.00 for 6. A cold-cut platter with bread starts at CHF 15.50 a head and rises to CHF 25.50 for a mixed fish platter of trout, salmon and prawns. A salad buffet is priced by how many varieties you pick, CHF 9.50 for 1 to 3, up to CHF 15.00 for 8 to 11. The core meat-and-sausage buffet runs 3 tiers, CHF 39.00 a head for premium cuts, CHF 35.00 for standard steaks and sausages, CHF 19.50 for the house's own sausage specialities, the Wiedikerli among them. A build-your-own burger bar is CHF 19.50 a head, costed around 150-gram patties and 2 burgers per person. A plated dinner tier runs from CHF 13.00 for spaghetti bolognese up to CHF 62.50 for sliced veal saddle. The top tier alone carries no fixed number: named premium single cuts, Rindsfilet, Tomahawk Steak, Kalbsfilet and the rest, are marked "Preis auf Anfrage," price on request.

VAT, staff and every chair billed on their own line

Every page of the brochure repeats the same qualifier: all prices are excluding Swiss VAT. Food is priced per person or per piece; nothing else is folded into that number. Drinks are a separate list entirely, soft drinks and Swiss beers at CHF 3.80 to 4.50 a bottle, coffee or tea at CHF 3.50 a head, wine from CHF 22.50 to 32.00 a bottle and sparkling from CHF 9.50 for a small bottle to CHF 16.50 for a full one. Staff are billed by the hour on their own line too: CHF 80 an hour for a grill cook or a service assistant on a weekday, CHF 120 on a Sunday or public holiday, whichever role you book. Furniture and equipment make up a third list on top of both: a gas grill for CHF 150 including cleaning, a spare bottle for CHF 55, standing tables at CHF 25 each, a trestle bench set seating eight for CHF 35, a proper tablecloth with laundering included for CHF 30, real porcelain place settings at CHF 8.50 against disposable ones at CHF 4.50. A refrigerated trailer costs CHF 300 a day, and the single priciest line on the whole sheet is a commercial steamer at CHF 1000 a day. What none of the 21 pages states, for any tier, is a minimum guest count.

Allergies noted on request, no cancellation clause to read

The brochure closes with five stated promises, among them "consideration of allergies and special dietary requirements," and a dedicated note that the catering team will detail ingredients, allergens and intolerances on request. A separate vegetarian-and-vegan section lists six named dishes, CHF 24.00 to 36.50 a head, rather than treating plant-based eating as an afterthought bolted onto the meat menu. What the brochure does not carry, anywhere in its 21 pages, is a deposit, an advance-payment schedule or a cancellation term. The only Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen published anywhere on the domain covers the mail-order meat shop instead, shipping, retention of title, what happens on a missed payment, and never once mentions catering, staffing or an event. A couple asking what happens if a date has to move would be asking a question this site has not written an answer to.

An English page with a request form that still checks German boxes

The catering page exists in English, translated cleanly enough: three short paragraphs describing the same Party-Service, Grillparty Package and partner-run Catering-Service. What that English page does not carry is any of the three PDF links. The 21-page priced brochure that is the real substance of the German page is simply absent from its English counterpart, which leaves an English-only reader with description and no numbers at all. The enquiry form fares worse in one specific way: the page shell translates cleanly, Request form, Type of event, Drinks, Send, but the actual options inside those two fields do not. Checked in the raw HTML rather than the rendered page, the "type of event" checklist carries the identical eleven German entries on the English page as on the German one, BBQ Grillbuffet through Sonstiges, and the drinks checklist is the same. A couple who reads only English can open the form, but has to tick German words to say what they're planning and what they'd like to drink.

None of this makes Metzgerei Keller a dedicated event caterer, and its own site never claims to be one. What it is: a working city butcher old enough to have rebuilt its own premises across three separate generations before most of its competitors existed, still making what it sells rather than reselling someone else's trays, and unusually willing to put a number next to almost everything in its catalogue, down to the rental cost of a champagne cooler. A couple who already knows what a reception needs and is happy to assemble it, course by course and chair by chair, from a butcher's own price list has more to work from here than most quote-only caterers in this category offer. A couple who wants one contact to hold the whole event together, or a booking path that stays in English from the first enquiry to the invoice, will have to build that layer themselves; this business supplies the food, the equipment and an hourly rate for the staff, not the coordination around them.