Planning Food for 75 Guests
Catering-scale logistics without a caterer
Seventy-five guests is genuinely catering scale, and the hard problems are equipment and timing rather than recipes. Very few home ovens can hold food for 75, so build the menu around dishes that are cooked in waves and hold well: pulled pork, baked pasta, and anything served from a chafing dish. If you are ordering in, split the order across two pickup windows so everything is not cooling at once.
Think in stations instead of a single table: one drink station per 40 guests, ice in 40-pound quantities rather than bags, and two serving lines run from both sides of the same table to halve the queue. Recruit at least two helpers whose only jobs are refilling and clearing; at this size the host cannot be the runner.
For the general rules behind these numbers (the 1-pound-per-adult baseline, how to mix mains and sides, and when to add a buffer), see Party Food Planning 101 or the serving size chart.