Baby Shower Catering in Brooklyn Without Cooking All Morning

A baby shower is a long afternoon, not a meal. Guests arrive across two or three waves, people eat standing, and the table has to look like a table at the end as well as the beginning. That's why shower orders from 1172 Park Place lean toward trays that hold: Pan Baked Chicken at $100 instead of fried, Pan Caesar Salad at $60, and a starch that doesn't turn to glue.

The other reason people order in is the one nobody says out loud. The person the party is for keeps trying to help. If the food comes in trays, there's nothing for her to help with.

Which trays suit a Brooklyn baby shower spread?

Baked over fried, and one thing that reads as light.

Pan Baked Chicken at $100 is the sensible anchor here. Fried chicken is wonderful in the first hour and less wonderful in the third, and a shower runs long. Baked holds its shape on a table where people are drifting back for seconds between games and gift opening.

Around it, Pan Caesar Salad at $60 does more work than its price suggests. It is the tray that makes a spread look like it was planned rather than assembled, and at a daytime party where nobody wants to feel heavy afterwards it is often the first thing to go. Then a starch: FreeTown Pasta at $85, or Pan Jollof Rice at $85 if you want color and something with more character on the table. Mac & Cheese at $90 is the tray the children and the teenagers will find first, and there are almost always more of them at a shower than anyone planned for.

That shape, a baked protein, something cold and green, a starch and the tray the children go for, is what a shower afternoon runs on. How many pans of each is a question for your room, not for this page, so bring the guest list to the call.

How do you build a shower table for guests who arrive in waves?

Assume nobody arrives on time and design for it.

The first wave is family and the people who came early to help. The second is the bulk of the guests, and the third trickles in through the afternoon because Brooklyn is Brooklyn and somebody is always coming off a shift. A spread that is spectacular for twenty minutes and bare afterwards is the classic shower mistake.

Trays help because they're refillable in a way a platter is not. Put out part of the pasta and hold the rest. Keep the salad in the cold until the room fills. Bring the chicken out once the second wave lands, not the moment the first person walks in.

If you are going to hold trays back, hold them properly. Keeping catering trays warm through a long afternoon covers what works and what quietly ruins the food while looking like it is helping.

There is a second reason to stagger the table, and it has nothing to do with the food. A shower has a shape to it. People arrive, they talk, there are games or there are not, gifts get opened, and somebody makes a speech nobody warned her about. If the whole spread is out from the first minute, the eating and the programme fight each other. Bring the main tray out between two parts of the afternoon and the room moves together instead of drifting.

How many pans does a baby shower need?

We don't publish how far one pan goes, and we're not going to invent it for a page.

Pan yield changes with the room. A shower where people are seated at tables eats differently from one where everybody is standing near a gift pile. A three hour afternoon with a cake at the end takes less savoury food than a lunch. Anyone printing a headcount next to a tray price is guessing, and you would be planning your day around their guess.

Call 718-799-7160. Say how many are invited, where it is, and whether people will be sitting. We'll size the order with you. That same call is the place to ask whether the trays can come to you or need collecting from Park Place, because that depends on the date and what you've ordered.

What about guests who cannot eat everything?

Ask on the phone, and ask before you order, not on the day.

We don't publish ingredient information for the trays, and a page is the wrong place to answer a question that has a real consequence for somebody. If a guest avoids meat, call and ask what can be prepared without it. If someone at the shower has to avoid peanuts, say so on the call and ask how the kitchen handles it, because peanut is a real ingredient in West African cooking and that question deserves a person, not a footnote.

The same applies to anything the guest of honour has been told to steer clear of. We'll tell you what a dish contains. We will not tell you what is safe for her, and you should be suspicious of any caterer who does.

Where does a shower sit against the other parties you might be planning?

Showers and birthdays get planned by the same people, often in the same month, and the ordering works identically.

A home birthday leans richer and later in the day, which changes the trays more than the process. Birthday party catering in Crown Heights and central Brooklyn walks through the three or four pan version of that. A bridal shower is a closer cousin, usually with a host who is paying and a guest list that keeps shifting, and bridal shower catering in central Brooklyn deals with that specific headache. For the general rules of buying food by the pan, party catering in Brooklyn ordered by the tray is the overview.

Ordering a shower spread

FreeTown African & American Cuisine is at 1172 Park Place in Crown Heights, and 718-799-7160 is the catering line. Before you dial, settle one thing: the address the food is going to. Everything else can be worked out on the call. Every pan and its price sits on the FreeTown catering menu, and the one most shower hosts underestimate is the $60 Caesar.