Catering a Family Gathering in Bedford Stuyvesant

A brownstone backyard is the best room in Bedford Stuyvesant and the worst one to serve food in.

It is bigger than any room in the house. It holds three generations without anyone sitting on a radiator. And it has no counter, no sink, usually no outlet, and exactly one way in, which runs through the front door, down a hallway, past whoever is talking in the kitchen, and out the back door or down the stoop steps. Every pan you order takes that trip. Most of them take it twice.

Plan the order around the route and the afternoon, and the food part becomes easy.

Why is a Bed Stuy backyard harder to cater than the yard itself suggests?

Because nothing you need is out there.

Inside the house there is a kitchen with heat, water, foil, a bin and a flat surface. Outside there is a folding table somebody borrowed, some chairs, and a wall. That gap is the whole problem. A tray that needs anything at all beyond a serving spoon is going to end up back inside within the hour, and then people are queueing in a hallway.

So the useful way to think about a backyard order is as two locations, not one. The kitchen is where the food lives and where anything gets replenished. The yard table is a shop window: what is out there is what people take. That means you put out the trays that are content to sit uncovered and keep the rest inside, bringing them out in rotation as the first ones go down.

What does the walk from the front door to a Bedford Stuyvesant backyard do to the order?

It caps how many pans you should be holding at once.

A full pan is wide, shallow and wants two hands, so nobody is carrying two. If your order is six trays, that is six trips through a hallway full of people, and then six more with empty pans on the way back. Anyone who has done it once starts thinking about tray count differently.

Two practical consequences. First, count who is helping before you count trays. Two people moving pans is fine. One person moving pans while also being the host is not. Second, work out where the trays wait. A hallway table or the bottom of the stairs is worth clearing in advance, because a stack of covered pans on a kitchen floor is how a lid ends up stepped on.

If the gathering is at an apartment and not a house, the carry is a staircase instead of a hallway, and getting hot pans up to a Prospect Lefferts Gardens apartment deals with that version of the problem.

Which trays hold up outside for a whole afternoon in Brooklyn?

The ones that were never depending on being piping hot in the first place.

Pan Fried Chicken at $100 is the backbone of an outdoor spread for exactly that reason. It is good hot, it is still good warm, and it's a thing people happily eat standing up with a napkin, which matters when half the yard has no chair. It also survives being picked at, which a backyard tray always is.

Pan Collard Greens at $60 is the tray that outlasts everything else on the table. Greens do not go sad the way a delicate side does, they read as a proper cooked vegetable to the older end of a family gathering, and at the lowest price on the sides list they are the cheapest way to make the table look complete.

Pan Jollof Rice at $85 does a job no other tray does at a family spread. It gives you a second starch that isn't another potato dish, it is seasoned all the way through so it needs nothing spooned over it, and it lands with both ends of the age range at once. Grandparents eat it and so do the teenagers who came for the chicken.

Mac and Cheese at $90 is the one to keep inside longest and bring out last. It's the tray everyone goes to first, so putting it out early empties it before half the family has arrived. Hold it back, put it out when the yard is full, and it does its job.

How do you scale a backyard spread up without doubling everything?

Add starch and sides. Leave the protein count alone.

A yard holds more people than a front room, so the order does go up. But doubling the protein trays is the expensive way to do it, and protein is rarely what runs out first. Another rice pan at $85 or another greens pan at $60 stretches the table further for less, and it keeps plates full while the protein is picked at over a longer stretch.

The other scaling lever is time, not volume. A backyard gathering doesn't eat in one sitting the way a hall does. People arrive across the afternoon, so a spread that is staged in two waves out of the kitchen goes further than the same food dumped on a table at the start. Same trays, different sequence, noticeably different result.

For the wider version of this, covering grills, weather and the shape of a cookout rather than a brownstone specifically, how a Brooklyn backyard cookout order gets built is the fuller read.

What has to be settled by phone before a Bed Stuy backyard order is real?

The tray count, first and last. How far one full pan goes isn't published on this site and it won't be guessed for you, because an afternoon of grazing and a sit-down meal take completely different numbers. Call 718-799-7160, say how many are coming and how long the yard will be full, and the count gets sized on the call.

Two more, both worth asking in the same breath. What time an order can be ready on your date. And whether the trays can come to you or whether someone is collecting them from 1172 Park Place in Crown Heights. That one depends on the day and the order, and no web page can promise it either way.

If you're still deciding between the yard and a smaller indoor gathering, what a Prospect Heights parlor floor does to the tray list is the other end of the same decision, catering a gathering in Clinton Hill sits between them, and the full list with every published price is on catering from the Crown Heights kitchen on Park Place.