How many starters for 200 guests?

Five welcome snacks for 200 guests. That is the answer nine times out of ten, and the reasoning is worth understanding because it generalises to every other course.

The total does not change. The split does.

A guest at an Indian buffet eats roughly 180 grams of snacks across the whole evening, whether you serve two dishes or eight. Adding dishes does not add appetite. It divides the same 36 kilos into more pans.

What does change is waste. Eight snacks means eight part-finished trays at the end of the night instead of five empty ones, and you paid for all eight.

Why five and not three

Three works only if your crowd is uniform. At 200 guests you almost certainly have a family that wants no onion and no garlic, a Jain guest or two, elders who want something familiar, and children who will eat nothing green. Five dishes lets you cover a paneer, something fried the children will actually eat, a tandoori item, one satvik option that does not announce itself as the compromise, and one that is simply good.

When to go higher

Two situations. A reception where snacks run for more than ninety minutes before dinner opens, because people graze rather than eat. And a wedding where two families with genuinely different food cultures are both hosting, where the menu is doing diplomatic work as well as feeding people.

Outside those two, eight snacks is money spent on variety nobody notices. Spend it on a second chaat counter instead — that one people remember.