“Creative. Fresh. Sustainable. Memorable. These have been our guiding principles for more than 25 years.” This is Elaine Bell Catering’s tagline. She could add “award-winning” to that slogan, having won Best Caterer in our 2004 readers’ poll and Best Company to Do Business With in Napa County this time. At the time of this writing, the company’s also been nominated as best company to do business with by the Small Business Administration. In addition, Executive Chef Andrew Arndt, recently won Chef of the Year honors at the 2008 Napa Valley Mustard Festival, competing against 16 Napa Valley restaurant chefs.
Elaine Bell started her company in 1981. After working as a chef for Domaine Chandon, she realized there was a great need for in-house entertaining at wineries to entertain food and wine writers. “It was an exciting time when I started, because it was the beginning of the great food and wine revolution of California,” explains Bell. “As we recognized the need, I decided to branch off and start catering for wineries to help them creatively attract food and wine writers from all over the world and then do food and wine pairings.”
From there, Bell quickly realized the Napa Valley could be a big attraction for the wedding business. So in the 1980s, she started marketing herself to the wedding industry. At the time, there were only three or four other caterers in Napa Valley. Clearly, her intuition proved correct, as the wedding industry exploded in Napa in the 1990s and continues growing today.
“I was a Napa Valley pioneer of creating great outdoor and indoor events for the wine business, both for the corporate and wedding industries,” says Bell, whose company now has 55 full-time employees and another 300 individuals on-call.
Never being one to “sit on her haunches,” Bell is constantly thinking of ways she can evolve the business and develop new programs. There’s already a division, called “Picnic People of Northern California,” which focuses on large corporate picnics and barbecues for parties of 50 to 3,000 or more, and a full-service liquor beverage catering company that offers bartending services. In addition, plans are in the works to develop a training program for individuals working in the hospitality industry.
“There’s a big need in Napa Valley to enhance the service our clients are getting,” explains Bell. “We need better training mechanisms for servers and hospitality people to keep up with the extremely high level of clientele we’re attracting—and the high prices they’re paying.”
Besides continually addressing what customers’ needs are—and creating programs to fill those needs—Bell also credits her success to being an extremely dedicated and hard worker who’s able to see the big picture. “[Success] definitely has to do with being open to seeing our strengths and our shortcomings and addressing those things,” says Bell. “It also has to do with being able to go out and find expertise to solve those issues or share positive issues. It’s a lot of hard work and dedication, constant evaluation of what’s happening, raising the bar and making sure everybody’s on the same page.”
Bell also realizes there’s more than one way to nourish her community. Elaine Bell Catering donates to a number of nonprofit organizations, including Hospice by the Bay, the Napa Volunteer Center, Sonoma Valley Boys and Girls Club and Speedway Children’s Charities.
For Elaine Bell Catering, success has never tasted so good.
