Picking Up Catering Yourself Versus Having It Delivered in Brooklyn

The choice between collecting your catering and arranging to have it brought to you is usually decided by three things: whether you have a car with a flat load space, how far the room is from the kitchen, and whether you can spare an hour on the day. Everything else is detail.

What it isn't decided by is a rule on a website. Whether an order can be brought to you, and on what terms, is a conversation on 718-799-7160 about your date, your address and your order. Nobody can tell you that in advance from a page, and any caterer who publishes a flat answer to it is oversimplifying. So this post is about the tradeoff itself, so you know which way you want the conversation to go before you dial.

What does collecting catering yourself really involve?

More than one trip to a counter, and this is where people underestimate it.

Full pans are large, flat and heavy. A modest spread of five or six trays is a real load. They cannot be tilted, they cannot be stacked more than a little, and they are hot enough at the edges to matter when you are carrying two of them across a pavement.

The kitchen is at 1172 Park Place, Brooklyn, NY 11213, in Crown Heights between Kingston and Albany. Practically, collecting means:

• A car with a boot or a back seat that is flat and clear, ideally with towels to wedge the pans level.
• Two people, or two trips. Two people is far better, because a second pair of hands halves the carry and stops a tray tipping in a doorway.
• Parking on Park Place, which is its own negotiation depending on the day and the hour.
• A clear route from the car to the room at the other end, including any stairs.

The advantage is control. You know exactly when the food left the kitchen because you were holding it. There is no window to wait through, no handover to coordinate, no wondering. For a lot of hosts that certainty is worth the hour.

When is collecting the wrong call in Brooklyn?

When the carrying is the problem, not the driving.

A third-floor walkup with a narrow stair turn is a different job from a ground-floor community room with a loading door. Six trays up three flights, in two trips, in August, is a genuinely bad hour you'll remember for the wrong reasons. If your room is up a staircase, read catering an event in a Brooklyn walkup or brownstone before you decide, because the building shapes this choice more than the distance does.

It's also the wrong call when you're the host and the only driver. Somebody has to be in the room when guests arrive. If that's you, and you're also the person collecting trays across the borough, you've designed a day where you're in two places. Hand one of those jobs to somebody else, whichever one it is.

How far is it, and does the distance change anything?

Within Crown Heights and the blocks around it, the drive is short enough that the trays barely notice. Prospect Heights, Bed-Stuy, Prospect Lefferts Gardens and most of the streets off Eastern Parkway and Nostrand are a short run in ordinary traffic.

The distance question is not really about miles. It is about time in the car with hot food, and time in the car is not a fixed number in this borough. A Saturday afternoon with a parade route, a closed section of Eastern Parkway or a game letting out can turn a ten minute drive into forty. Plan the trip against the worst version of the road, not the best one, and decide what happens to the food while you are in it.

That is a holding problem more than a driving problem, and it has a real answer. Keeping catering trays warm through a long event covers foil, low ovens and chafing racks, and most of it applies to the back of a car as much as to a table.

What has to be confirmed on the phone?

All of the terms. None of them are printable in advance because none of them are the same for every order.

• Whether the order can be brought to you at all, given your date and your address.
• What that costs, if it is available.
• What time the food can be ready, and therefore what time it could arrive.
• Whether the trays will be hot on handover or packed to be reheated at the other end.
• Who carries them at your end, and to which door.

Ask those in one go, early in the call, because the answers change what you order. A spread you are collecting looks different from a spread arriving at a fixed hour. This is one of the things the call is for, and it is part of why catering orders go through a phone call rather than a form.

Which one should you choose?

A rough rule, from watching how these days go.

• Collect if you have a car with a flat load space, a second person, and the room is a short drive with no stairs at either end.
• Collect if the timing is tight and you would rather own it than wait for it.
• Ask about the alternative if the room is up stairs, if you are the host and the driver, or if the food has to be in place at a fixed hour while you are doing something else.
• Ask about it too if the order is large. There is a size beyond which one car and two arms is the wrong tool, and you will know it when you count the trays.

Neither choice is the smart one in general. They are different distributions of the same work, and the right answer is whichever one puts the effort on the day where you have the most slack.

What comes after the food arrives?

The same thing either way. Trays land, and the room becomes the job: table, spoons, plates, a line that moves, somewhere for the empty pans to go.

Getting the food to Brooklyn is the last logistics problem the kitchen shares with you. Everything after handover is yours. The full ordering sequence from first call to collection walks the whole thing end to end, and what catering looks like in Crown Heights specifically covers the neighborhood side, including which rooms are close enough that the drive stops being a factor at all.