Gault&Millau Event Catering Awards

Partner news: De Casteleer x Catermonkey

De Casteleer in Kasterlee has a reputation you don't buy with fine words. You earn it through repetition: parties that work, a team that thinks ahead, and a kitchen that outgrows the level of any venue. With Zjaar Catering, their concept for catering on location, they carried that expertise beyond their own walls. That Zjaar won the Innovation in Catering Award at the Gault&Millau Event Catering Awards 2025 feels, then, like a recognition that simply makes sense.

Gault&Millau describes the winners of that edition as caterers who combine refined gastronomy with a unique experience. For Zjaar, it was specifically innovation, renewal and originality. Their own communication is full of pride and ambition: the award is "a lovely boost" and "an incentive to keep innovating", with clear thanks to team and customers.

What made Zjaar stand out, then? According to the municipality of Kasterlee, it was mainly the combination of a user-friendly webshop with a VR experience that lets customers explore the fully decorated event venue beforehand. Gault&Millau agrees, pointing to their fresh, bold approach and the fact that a VR headset gives you a preview of what the future party will look like. Innovation, in other words, shows up as much in how a customer chooses and decides as it does on the menu.

Like the other awards, this recognition was presented during the seventh edition of the Catering Awards, on 8 September 2025 in Brussels, at the Maison de la Poste site. In a setting like this, it comes down to more than creativity: the sector is judged on professionalism, structure and the way you put your promise into practice.

Catermonkey as extra staff behind the scenes

Catermonkey is a software platform for party professionals that brings every process together, from quote to planning and invoicing, with a particular focus on overview and time saved. The team behind the product deliberately stays close to the trade: solutions grow out of years of conversations with caterers, traiteurs and banqueting halls. Catermonkey is used in the Netherlands and Belgium and is tuned to local realities such as multiple languages and VAT structures.

Here too, the scope is clear: Catermonkey builds the digital foundation. No purchasing service, no external staffing and no running of events. What it does give you is the structure to respond faster, work more consistently and have your whole team looking at the same facts.

"The award gave us a boost in visibility. With Catermonkey we could handle that extra inflow in a structured way, without the personal contact suffering for it."

Partnership: innovation that can grow

A concept like Zjaar sells on experience, but it grows on repeatability. When customers decide faster through widgets and VR, you need to move just as fast internally, without mistakes creeping in. The collaboration with Catermonkey is therefore about organising choice options, quote building, follow-up and internal handover tightly, so the exciting customer-facing story never runs into delays behind the scenes.

"We want innovation to be practical too. Catermonkey helps us record choices and agreements consistently, so every event reaches the same level of quality."

"The combination of widgets, VR, a solid quote and invoicing process, and a strong digital 'back end' behind the company means customers decide faster and we can deliver faster."

The Innovation in Catering Award rewards a vision: the experience starts long before the first dish. De Casteleer and Zjaar show that this vision only gains real strength when creativity and organisation reinforce each other.

This article originally appeared on catering.gaultmillau.be .