Catering an Event in a Church Basement or Community Room

A community room is not a venue. It is somebody else's room that you have been allowed to use, and the difference shows up in every decision you make about food.

You did not choose the tables. You cannot move the outlets. There is a person with a key who has other things to do that day, and a time the room has to be handed back. The kitchen behind the serving hatch may be locked, may be off limits, or may belong to a group that uses it on a different night. Plan the food around those facts and the event works. Plan around the food and you find out about the facts at the worst moment.

What is different about catering an event in a Brooklyn community room?

Nothing about the room is yours, including the parts that look like they are.

The tables are folding tables. They are lighter than they look and they flex in the middle, which matters when you are putting several full pans on one. There will be fewer than you expect and at least one will be the wrong height. The chairs are stacked somewhere and putting them out is your job.

The floor is usually the reason for half the house rules. No candles, nothing that stains, nothing hot on a surface, food only in the room you booked. Those rules are not negotiable and they are rarely written down anywhere you will find them, which is why the first job is not ordering food. It is a conversation with whoever holds the key.

Who has the key, and what do you need from them?

One person, usually, and they are doing this as a favour or as one duty among many. Get to them early, ask everything at once, and write the answers down.

Every one of those changes the order you place. A room where rubbish leaves with you is a room where you want fewer, larger trays and a plan for carrying them back out. A room with no kitchen access is a room where everything has to be finished before it arrives.

How many outlets does a shared room really have?

Fewer than the number of things you were planning to plug in, and rarely where the tables are.

Community rooms and church basements were wired for lights and a vacuum cleaner, not for a serving line. Count the outlets yourself. Don't trust a description, and check whether any of them are on a switch that somebody else controls. An outlet behind a stack of chairs at the far wall isn't an outlet you can use with a table in front of it.

The safe design is one that needs no power at all. Food that arrives finished and gets served promptly doesn't need a socket. That beats an extension lead run across a floor people are walking on, which most rooms won't allow anyway.

Which trays suit a Brooklyn community room with no kitchen access?

Complete dishes that arrive as one thing. Catering from 1172 Park Place in Crown Heights is packed by the full pan, so each tray is a closed unit of one dish. No assembly, no finishing, nothing that needs a stove.

White Rice at $40 is the cheapest way to fill a table and the most forgiving item on the list under community-room conditions. Pan Baked Chicken at $100 is the protein that suits this room best: it holds its shape on a flexing folding table, it serves cleanly with one spoon, and it does not need to be cut or portioned by whoever is standing behind it.

Pan Collard Greens at $60 and Mac & Cheese at $90 are the two sides that get asked about by name at gatherings like this, and between them they do most of the work of making a spread feel finished. If the room is one where the food will sit for a while, put the mac at the front of the line, not the end.

Fewer trays, larger, arriving together. That's the shape that works in a room you don't control.

How does the handback time change a community room order?

It compresses everything, and it compresses the end more than the beginning.

You are not just serving food inside your window. You are setting up, serving, clearing, bagging and getting the room back to how you found it, all before the key comes back. People routinely plan the first two and forget the last three, and the food is what suffers, usually by being served late because setup ran long.

The ordering consequence is to keep serving simple. One line, one direction, one spoon per tray, nothing that needs a person assembling plates. How to set up a buffet table for a party covers the layout itself in detail, and it is worth reading before you decide how many tables you are asking for.

How do trays get from Park Place into a shared room?

Somebody carries them, and that somebody should be two people. Full pans are wide, flat and heavier than they look, and shared rooms are frequently down a flight of stairs from the street with a door that does not stay open.

Whether an order can come to you or gets collected from 1172 Park Place, and on what terms, is a question for 718-799-7160. It's not something to read off a page. So is whether serving utensils, racks or any setup come with the order. In a room that supplies nothing, that answer changes what you need to bring, so get it before the day, not on it.

If the route into the room involves a stoop, a narrow hall or a turning stair, getting catering trays up four flights in a Brooklyn walkup is about that carry specifically and applies just as much to a basement door.

What still has to be settled on the phone?

The tray count, and the timing.

We don't publish how far a full pan goes, and we won't guess. It depends on whether people sit down to a plate or graze along a table for three hours, how many other trays are out, and whether somebody's family also brought a pot. A community room event is the hardest version of that question to answer from a distance, which is exactly why it belongs on a call rather than in a paragraph.

Pin down the ready time first. In a room with a hard handback it's the detail everything else hangs off, and it depends on your date, so 718-799-7160 is where that conversation happens.

If the money for the event was fixed before the menu was, ordering to a fixed pot of money in Brownsville is the companion to this page. For the full tray list and how the four sections are priced, start with what catering costs in Crown Heights, and catering for a gathering in Prospect Heights covers the same kind of order in a different set of rooms.