Getting Catering Trays Up Four Flights in a Brooklyn Walk Up

The food is the easy part. The stairs are not.

Catering here is packed by the full pan, and a full pan is a wide, flat, heavy object with a lid that is not designed to be tilted. Most of the housing in this borough is a stoop, a hall, a turn and then two, three or four flights with no lift and no service entrance. Nobody plans for that, and then everybody stands in a vestibule at the worst possible moment working it out with their hands full.

This is the plan you make instead. It has nothing to do with which neighborhood you are in and everything to do with the shape of the building.

How do you get catering trays up a Brooklyn walkup?

In stages, with two people, and with the landing cleared first.

The instinct is to carry everything in one heroic trip. Do not. A stack of full pans is stable on a flat surface and unstable in a stairwell, especially on a turning landing where you have to change the angle of your body while holding something wide. One tray each, one trip at a time, is slower and it is the version where nothing ends up on the stairs.

Send two people if the order is more than a couple of trays. The second person is not there to carry twice as much. They are there to hold a door, take the top tray off the stack at the turn, and stop the whole thing becoming a balancing problem on a landing.

What is a full catering pan like to handle?

Wider than a shopping bag and less forgiving than a box. The width is the part that surprises people. A tray that fits comfortably in your arms in the street becomes a problem the moment you meet a banister, a bike parked in a hall, or a door that opens inward onto the exact spot you need to stand.

Keep it flat. Don't tip it to get round a corner. If it won't go through flat, put it down, move whatever is in the way, and try again. Angling it and hoping is how a lid comes off.

Full pans are heavier than they look, and you feel it on the second flight, not the first. Plan the route as though you'll be tired halfway up, because you will be.

Why does a Brooklyn brownstone stoop change the order of operations?

Because it puts a set of exterior steps between the vehicle and the door, and there is usually nowhere to set anything down on the way.

The stoop is where the double-parked car and the front door are furthest apart in effort even though they are close in distance. It is also where the person holding the trays cannot open anything. So the sequence matters: someone opens the front door and props it before the first tray leaves the car. Not while. Before.

If the party is in a garden-level or parlour-floor apartment, the stoop may be avoidable altogether through a lower entrance. Find that out in advance. Discovering it after three trips over the top is a special kind of annoying.

How narrow is too narrow for a catering tray in a Brooklyn brownstone?

Measure once and you will never wonder again. The three pinch points in this housing stock are the vestibule between the two front doors, the turn at the bottom of the stair, and the doorway into the room where the food is going.

Walk the route empty-handed with your arms out at tray width before the day. It takes ninety seconds and it tells you whether you're carrying trays flat or whether somebody is going to be reversing down a stair. If a doorway is genuinely too tight, set the table up in a different room. Don't change the order.

Clear the route while you're at it. Shoes, the stroller, the bin, the thing that lives at the bottom of the stairs. Every one of them is fine to step over and impossible to step over while holding a tray you can't see your feet past.

Does anyone carry the trays inside for you?

Ask plainly on 718-799-7160, and don't assume either answer. Whether an order can come to you at all or gets collected from the kitchen, on what terms, and what happens at the door are things that depend on the day and the order. We don't publish a rule about it, and you shouldn't plan around a rule you read on a website.

The safe assumption when you're building the plan is that the carry is yours. If it turns out otherwise, you've lost nothing by having a second person available. Plan it the other way round and be wrong, and you're alone on a stoop with a stack of pans.

The difference between collecting an order and having it come to you sets out what each side of that changes about the rest of your planning.

What should you sort out before you call?

Five things, all about the building and none about the food.

• Which entrance the trays are coming through, and who is holding the door.
• How many flights, and whether there is a lift at all.
• The narrowest point on the route, measured with your arms and not guessed.
• Where the trays land when they get in, since a table has to exist before the first one arrives.
• Whether anyone is available to be the second pair of hands, and at what time they're genuinely free.

With those answered, the call is about food again. FreeTown African & American Cuisine is at 1172 Park Place in Crown Heights, and the tray list is a published set of prices you can read off before you dial, from White Rice at $40 up through Pan Fried Chicken at $100 and Mac & Cheese at $90. Ring 718-799-7160 to settle the tray count. How far a pan goes depends on your room and your guests, so there's no number we could honestly print here.

If the event is happening in a shared room rather than someone's apartment, the constraints are different and worth reading separately in what to sort out before an event in a community room. If your date lands on a day the parkway corridor is closed, planning a pickup around Eastern Parkway street closures covers the access problem before it reaches your front door. And for the local version of all of this, how catering is priced and collected in Crown Heights and ordering catering in Prospect Lefferts Gardens both deal with the same housing stock a few blocks apart.