Forty Folded Menus for Super Bowl Sunday, Ordered at 13:09 and Delivered the Same Afternoon
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At 13:09 on Super Bowl Sunday 2024, Chiltern Firehouse sent one email: the PDF of that evening’s menu, “we need to print by today asap”, forty copies. Rather than reply with questions, we printed a physical sample and sent it for approval — “Thank you, it looks great. Please proceed” came back at 14:03, and forty folded menus were on their way to Marylebone, W1U the same afternoon, hours before kick-off.
Written by Maciej Antosz, Production Manager at Silver Image London ·
This is an account of one job, not a turnaround promise. Send us yours and we will come back with a firm figure.
A Sunday lunchtime, one email, one afternoon
The times below are as they sit in the email thread. The entire exchange, from first contact to “please proceed”, took fifty-four minutes — on a Sunday.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 13:09 | The menu PDF arrived with a one-line brief: “we need to print by today asap”, forty copies. The artwork was ready to print as sent. |
| Minutes later | Instead of a quote full of questions, our reply was: let us print a sample and come back to you shortly. For a menu that guests will hold, a proof you can hold answers everything a PDF cannot — colour, card, fold. |
| 14:03 | “Thank you, it looks great. Please proceed with the printing.” Delivery address confirmed in the same message: Chiltern Street, W1U. |
| Same afternoon | The run of forty printed, folded and delivered to Marylebone, W1U — on the tables before the first kick-off crowd arrived. |
Written up from the email thread. Nobody is named, the client’s phone number is not published, and beyond the event name on the cover the menu itself is not described here — the card is the client’s work; the printing is ours.
Why print a sample when the clock is running?
It looks like a detour and it is the opposite. A single-night menu has no second chance: if the red prints muddy or the fold lands a millimetre off the spine, forty copies are wrong in front of a full house. Printing one copy first cost minutes; it bought an approval that meant the run of forty was printed once, correctly, with no reprint risk left in the evening. On short-notice work we would rather show than describe — the same reason our file guide tells people to export the PDF and look at it before sending.
An event menu is a different product from a house menu
A restaurant’s standing menu is built to survive weeks of service — heavier card, often laminated, reprinted on a cycle. A single-night event menu is the other way round: it exists for one evening, it has a date on the cover, and its whole value is being right and being there. That makes it a same-day product almost by definition — the brief cannot exist until the event is close, and the deadline cannot move because the event will not. Formats, cards and folding options are on the menu printing page.
Sunday at 13:09 is a working hour here
The quiet hero of this job is the timestamp. On the biggest sports Sunday of the year, most print counters in London are closed and answering nothing. Our production runs seven days a week, which is why a 13:09 Sunday email got a printed sample instead of a Monday-morning reply — and why hospitality clients around Marylebone and the West End treat a same-day menu as an orderable thing rather than a favour.
If you are ordering event menus at short notice
- Send the PDF with the first email. The clock starts when the artwork arrives. This one was print-ready at 13:09, which is why everything after it was fast.
- Say the quantity and the deadline in one line. “Forty copies, by tonight” is a complete brief.
- Ask for a printed sample if there is time for one. For menus there usually is — approval in hand beats approval on screen, and it removes the reprint risk entirely.
- Confirm the delivery address early. A venue on a Sunday needs the door and the name of whoever is on shift, not just a postcode.
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