Holiday Catering in Brooklyn, Ordered as Trays You Can Count

Holiday catering in Brooklyn is easiest to buy the way it is priced, which is by the whole pan. A pan is a unit you can count. You can point at it on a table, you can carry it, and you can tell a room how many of them there are. At FreeTown African & American Cuisine, 1172 Park Place in Crown Heights, every catering item is a full party tray with one whole tray price, and those prices run from $40 at the low end to $165 at the top. Nothing on the list is priced by the plate.

That single fact changes how you plan. You aren't counting mouths against a menu of individual portions. You are choosing pans, and deciding how many of each a holiday table needs.

What does holiday catering cost in Crown Heights?

The whole range sits between $40 and $165, and the number depends almost entirely on the protein. A tray of white rice is $40. Pan Collard Greens is $60, and so is Pan Caesar Salad. Mashed Potato is $80. Pan Jollof Rice and FreeTown Pasta are both $85. Mac and Cheese is $90.

Then the meat and seafood trays climb. Pan Fried Chicken and Pan Baked Chicken are $100 each. Pan Whiting is $115. Jerk Chicken and Fried Chicken Suya are $120. Pan Shrimp is $125. Pan Turkey Wings is $140. Pan Salmon is $150. Pan Steak is $160, and Pan Lamb and Lamb Suya sit at the top at $165.

Read those numbers as tray prices and only as tray prices. A $140 pan of turkey wings is a pan of turkey wings. It isn't the cost of one plate and it isn't a starting price that grows once you call. A fuller breakdown of the whole list lives in the guide to what a Brooklyn catering tray costs by the pan.

Why is a holiday order built out of whole pans?

Because a holiday table is not a restaurant service. Nobody is taking orders. People walk in, people go back for a second plate, cousins arrive later than they said they would, and somebody always leaves with a plate wrapped in foil. Counting individual portions against that is a losing exercise.

Pans absorb the chaos. You put out a pan, it goes down, you put out the next one. When the day is over you can see exactly what is left, and you know what to send home with whom. The same logic is why churches, community rooms and family halls across Crown Heights have run on foil trays and chafing racks for decades. It isn't a compromise. It's the format that fits how people eat on a holiday.

It also makes the money legible. Four trays at known prices is a number you can decide on before you spend it, which is not always true of catering sold by headcount.

Which trays hold up on a Brooklyn holiday table?

The trays that carry a holiday spread are usually the ones that hold heat, hold up to being served twice, and do not need last minute assembly. Whichever holiday you are cooking for, the same handful keeps coming up.

That mix is the point of this kitchen. Soul food trays and West African trays come out of the same order, on the same day, from the same phone call. In central Brooklyn that combination is genuinely hard to buy anywhere else, which is why the soul food catering side of the menu and the jollof tray keep ending up on the same table.

What should you cook yourself and what should you buy?

The useful question is not what you can make. It is what your kitchen can physically hold on a holiday.

Most home cooks running a holiday in a Brooklyn apartment or a brownstone have one oven, four burners, and a fridge that is already full. The dishes that break that setup are the ones that need long low heat or a lot of surface area. Greens simmer forever. Mac and cheese wants an oven rack for a long stretch. A big protein tray takes the whole oven and then needs to rest.

So buy the space hogs and keep the dishes you want to make yourself. Somebody in the family has a gravy, a dressing, a sweet potato dish, or a pie that would start a fight if it came from anywhere else. Keep those. Hand off the rest.

That split also keeps the budget honest. You are paying for the trays that save you hours, not for the ones you would have enjoyed making.

Four answers that only exist on the phone

Some questions have real answers, and the only place to get them is a call. This kitchen won't guess at them in writing, and no honest caterer should.

How many people a single full pan covers depends on what else is on the table, whether it's one plate or two, and whether people are eating standing up. There's no fixed number, and a made up one would cost you money in either direction. Call 718-799-7160 and describe the room, and the order gets sized against your real headcount.

How much notice the kitchen needs for a particular date is a question for the phone, not for a blog post. So is whether an order can be brought to you and what that involves. So is what time on a given date an order can be ready. Those answers depend on the date, the size of the order and what else is in the kitchen that week, and the only person who can give you a real one is the person who picks up.

Which holiday are you planning for?

Each occasion pulls the spread in a slightly different direction, and there is a page here for each one.

Thanksgiving is an oven capacity problem more than a cooking problem, which is why buying the Thanksgiving trays that hog the oven is usually the whole strategy. Christmas in central Brooklyn tends to run across two days and two waves of visitors, so the spread has to survive being served twice. New Year Day is the meal nobody in the house wants to cook, greens and rice and something warm. Easter squeezes a full dinner into the gap after a long morning. Mother Day is about the person who normally cooks not cooking. Father Day is usually meat and an afternoon outdoors.

Super Bowl Sunday, Juneteenth, Memorial Day, the Fourth and Kwanzaa all have their own posts too. The pricing is the same across every one of them. What changes is which pans you pick.

How do you place a holiday catering order in Crown Heights?

You call. 718-799-7160 reaches the kitchen at 1172 Park Place, and the conversation is short and practical. You say what day, roughly how many people, and what the room is like. The kitchen tells you what's possible and how many pans that comes to. You confirm the trays. Nothing else happens, and the guide to how to order catering in Brooklyn without a quote form walks it through in more detail.

If you are still working out whether you are hosting a sit down dinner or a stand up crowd with food out all afternoon, the notes on planning a Brooklyn party spread around trays will help you get to a shape before you dial. You can also read the full tray list at https://www.freetownbk.com/menu and come to the phone already knowing which pans you want.

One last thing worth saying plainly. Holidays are the days people care most about, and the days a kitchen is busiest. Nothing in this post asserts a calendar, a cutoff or a booking window, because those are not things to guess at. Call, ask, and get a real answer for your date.