Baptism and Christening Reception Catering in Brooklyn

The meal after a christening is not a party. It is a room with a grandmother in the good chair, three toddlers under the table, and a set of godparents who have driven in from somewhere. The food should be gentle, familiar and easy to eat sitting down with a child on your lap.

That rules out most of what a caterer will try to sell you. It rules in baked chicken, rice, mashed potato and greens, which is what people ask for anyway once they stop thinking about it.

What food suits a christening reception in Brooklyn?

Plain and warm. Nothing that fights back.

The room usually spans eighty years of age. The oldest people there want food they recognize. The youngest want something soft. Everybody is in clothes they cannot get a stain on, and half of them are holding a baby. That is a real constraint, not a stylistic one, and it points at a very specific spread.

• Pan Baked Chicken at $100. Baked, not fried. Easier to eat, easier to serve, and it doesn't leave a room full of people in church clothes wiping their hands.
• Mashed Potato at $80. The gentlest thing on our menu, and the tray that feeds the very old and the very young without either group needing a separate plan.
• White Rice at $40. The cheapest tray we make. It rounds out every plate and it's the fallback for any child who is refusing everything else.
• Pan Collard Greens at $60. The Southern green on the list, and the dish the grandparents at the table will notice and comment on.
• Mac and Cheese at $90. The children's answer. Order it and stop worrying about the children.

That is the shape of a christening table: something baked, something plain, something starchy, something green, and the tray the children go to first. Which of them you order, and how many pans of each, is what the phone call decides.

Should the reception be in the church hall or back at the apartment?

Both work, and they change the order in different ways.

A church hall gives you tables, space and a room that empties in an hour. You can put out a proper line, people serve themselves, and the trays go home with somebody afterwards. If your gathering is a congregation-wide event rather than one family's reception, church function catering in Brooklyn covers that larger, more logistical version.

An apartment is tighter and more intimate, and it has its own rules: a narrow stair, a small kitchen counter, and everybody standing in one room. Trays land on the counter, not on a table, and people eat where they can. If you are hosting in a walkup or a brownstone floor-through, catering for a Brooklyn walkup or brownstone is worth reading before the trays arrive, because getting five pans up two flights is a real logistical event.

What does a christening reception cost to cater in Crown Heights?

Every figure on our menu is a full pan, also called a party tray. It is not the price of one serving, and it should never be multiplied by your guest count.

The full catering list runs from $40 to $165. A christening spread sits mostly in the lower half, because baked chicken, rice, mashed potato and greens are all in the bottom two thirds. This is not a top-of-the-menu occasion. Nobody at a christening is looking for a showpiece; they are looking for a plate of good food and a chair.

FreeTown African & American Cuisine cooks all of it at 1172 Park Place in Crown Heights.

How do you time the food around a church service?

This is the part families get wrong, and it's the part we can't solve on a web page.

The gap between the end of the service and the start of the reception is usually short, and it is often eaten up by photographs. So the food has to be in the room before the family gets there, which means somebody who is not in the photographs has to be the one collecting it.

What time we can have an order ready depends on the day and on what else is in the kitchen, so call 718-799-7160 and ask us about your date directly. Do not plan backward from an assumption. Same for delivery: whether we can bring it to the hall or the apartment, and on what terms, is a question for the phone.

Two practical suggestions that have nothing to do with us. Nominate one person who leaves the service early to receive the food and set the table. And decide in advance where the trays are going to sit, because a christening reception discovers its lack of counter space at the worst possible moment.

How much should you order for a family reception?

We don't publish how many people a full pan feeds, and we're not going to start on this page.

The number depends on how many trays are on the table, whether the room is eating a full meal or picking after a long morning, and how many of your headcount are children. At a christening a surprising share of the room barely eats, because they are holding a baby or talking to somebody they have not seen in five years. A tray count built off a guest list alone will be wrong in one direction or the other.

Call 718-799-7160 with your headcount and a rough sense of the room, and we'll size it with you. It's a short conversation and it's the only honest way to answer the question.

Ordering christening catering from 1172 Park Place

FreeTown is a family kitchen rooted in Freetown, Sierra Leone, cooking West African and Southern food from one menu. For a Brooklyn family reception that is more useful than it sounds. A christening pulls in relatives from more than one place, and a table that can carry rice, greens and baked chicken alongside West African dishes lets a mixed family eat together without anybody being catered around.

Tell us the date, the headcount, where the reception is happening, and what the room looks like, and we'll build the tray list from there. 718-799-7160.

For the general shape of full-tray ordering, party catering in Brooklyn is the wider guide. If the family gathering you are planning is a standing weekend meal rather than a one-off reception, Sunday dinner catering in Crown Heights is the closer read, and if it's an outdoor summer gathering, backyard cookout catering in Brooklyn covers that yard instead. Whichever it turns out to be, the mashed potato tray at $80 is the one nobody regrets.