Tietze's Catering

Tietze's Catering runs a page called Private Catering that arranges 6 everyday occasions into one grid, each with its own short page: Birthday Party, Christening, Dinner with Friends, Ladies' Lunch, Grill Party BBQ and Christmas Time. One more entry sits just under those 6, a Private Chef who cooks in a client's own kitchen rather than a rented hall. Wedding Catering isn't part of that grid at all. It has been pulled into its own top-level menu, Wedding, alongside a page of partner venues and an optional wedding-planning collaboration, and it carries more text than any other single page on the site. So before a word of sales copy, the site's own structure says 2 things at once. A wedding gets promoted above every other private occasion. And Ladies' Lunch, filed a tier down and sitting right beside Birthday Party, is proof the same kitchen treats a lunch for a few guests as a routine booking rather than an afterthought squeezed in around bigger events.

The Ladies' Lunch page backs that reading up with a level of detail its wedding page never bothers with. It runs a full sample menu start to finish: flying fingerfood built around a porcini omelette, a shrimp bonbon in rice paper and a blinis beef tartare, a chestnut apple shot between courses, porcini ravioli with sage butter or duck breast with orange sauce and potato dumplings for the main, flambeed orange fillets with fior di latte sorbet or plum mousse to finish. It lists 10 dietary categories on request, ovo-lacto vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian, gluten-free and lactose-free among them, plus menus without pork, nuts, seafood or shellfish, and it specifically mentions catering for pregnant guests, a line that appears nowhere on the wedding page. The wedding page, by contrast, publishes no sample menu at all. It only names the stages a wedding can run through, a welcome drink, an aperitif after the ceremony, dinner, dessert or wedding cake, a bar party, a midnight snack, and leaves the actual dishes to the planning conversation. The dietary list is the one piece of detail that carries over exactly: the same 10 categories appear, worded almost identically, on the Ladies' Lunch page, the Christening page and the general FAQ, so whatever accommodation a small lunch gets, a wedding gets the same handling, at least on paper.

Marco Tietze founded the business in 2004, giving it over 20 years of trading by the time this was written, and the About page names him directly as a trained chef with experience in upscale gastronomy, without saying where. He still lists a personal email, mtietze@tietzes-catering.ch, alongside the general company address. What the site never quite settles is where the food for a wedding actually gets cooked. It describes a specific Private Chef product that comes to a client's home or chosen venue and shops, cooks and serves there start to finish, but that product has its own name and its own short page, kept separate from Wedding Catering, and nothing on the wedding page itself says the wedding meal follows the same on-site model rather than being prepared centrally and finished on arrival. A couple who cares about that distinction has to ask rather than read it off the page.

A corkage fee is the only price the site prints

Ask what a wedding costs and the wedding page answers with process, not a figure. It asks a couple to settle a food and drink budget and a guest count early, then promises an individually tailored offer once those are in. No price, package or per-head range appears anywhere on that page. The closest the whole site comes to a fixed number is buried in the general FAQ's answer about drinks: bring your own wine and Tietze's charges a corkage fee of CHF 15 per 75-cl bottle. The same FAQ recommends a lead time of 4 to 6 weeks for a smaller private event, though for a wedding it only says earlier planning makes sense, without naming a week count. Cancellation runs on a sliding scale too, the closer to the date, the more of the already-scheduled work gets billed, plus a deposit, but neither the percentages nor the deposit amount are published; the site says only that the exact terms get set when the order is confirmed. One firmer number does show up, in the FAQ section addressed partly to wedding planners rather than couples directly: the final guest count is locked in 7 days before the event, with extra guests billed separately after that point. For apero-style orders specifically, not full dinners, Tietze's will still take a booking up to 4 hours before the event starts, for up to 250 people, which says more about how tightly the kitchen runs than about wedding pricing itself.

19 partner venues, and a refusal to broker the booking

The Venues page lists 19 partner locations by name, from a 12-person boat charter on the lake to Papiersaal, a former paper mill that takes up to 700 guests, with capacities scattered across everything in between. Only 2 are captioned specifically for weddings: St. Charles Hall in Lucerne, described as a dream wedding venue and rated for 50 to 150 people, and Meggenhorn Castle near Lucerne, also captioned for dream weddings and rated for 40 to 100. The rest are pitched at events and business bookings generally, which matches what the FAQ says about the arrangement itself. Tietze's does not act as a booking agent for any of them. Couples sign the venue rental agreement directly with the venue, and the FAQ is specific about why: rental rates vary widely and are often significantly higher than a private host initially assumes, so the company says it deliberately avoids firing off a binding inquiry to a venue on the strength of a short contact form. That's a genuinely useful boundary for a couple to know going in. Tietze's will point toward a venue and cook there, but the lease is a separate negotiation the couple has to run themselves.

An optional wedding planner, hired and billed separately

Couples who want more hand-holding than a caterer alone provides can add a collaboration with Evelyne Schärer of yourperfectday.ch, described as one of Switzerland's more established wedding planners, with over 650 weddings behind her and past coverage as a wedding expert on the Swiss TV format 4 Weddings and a Dream Trip. Her own byline dates her practice to 2004, the same year Marco Tietze states as his own founding year, though the page never claims Marco Tietze and Evelyne Schärer have actually worked together that long, only that each independently reaches back to it. The arrangement stays clearly optional and separately billed. The wedding page repeats twice that a wedding with Tietze's works fine without a planner, and the wedding-planning page states the cost depends on scope and complexity without naming a figure. It reads as a genuine add-on for couples who want it rather than a bundled requirement dressed up as one.

What still has to be asked directly

2 gaps matter for a couple planning from a distance. The only mention of a tasting anywhere on the site sits inside an FAQ answer aimed at agencies and wedding planners, test meals listed alongside menu suggestions and schedules, with no cost or process attached, so whether a couple booking directly gets one, and what it involves, has to be asked rather than assumed. And while the whole site runs as a genuine, full English translation rather than a thin overlay on a German original (German is still the default language a couple lands on without the /en/ path in the address bar), nothing on it states outright that the tasting, the contract and the wedding day itself are actually run in English rather than just documented in it. Neither gap is a red flag. Over 20 years trading from the same Zurich address, a founder who still lists his own email, a menu that names real dishes rather than vague categories, and a wine policy specific enough to print a bottle fee all point to an operation that answers its own questions when it chooses to. The 2 it leaves open are exactly the ones worth raising on the first call.