Memorial Day Cookout Catering in Brooklyn With a Rain Plan

What should you order for a Memorial Day cookout in Brooklyn if the forecast keeps changing?

Order food that doesn't care where it gets eaten. Start there and the forecast stops being your problem. A Memorial Day spread built entirely around a grill and a folding table in a yard has one failure mode, and every year a number of people in Brooklyn hit it. A spread built from full trays has none, because trays move indoors in one trip.

The version of that from our catering menu is Pan Fried Chicken at $100, Pan Whiting at $115, Mac & Cheese at $90, Pan Caesar Salad at $60 and White Rice at $40. Not one of those items needs a yard, a grill, or a working forecast. All five are party trays priced by the full pan, so you're buying a quantity of food rather than a seating plan.

Which trays work the same in a yard and in a living room?

Some cookout food is fundamentally outdoor food. It needs to come off a grill, be eaten within a few minutes, and be handled with tongs by somebody standing over heat. Move it inside and it stops making sense.

Tray food is different. It arrives cooked, it sits in a pan, and it's equally at home on a picnic table or a kitchen counter. These are the ones that genuinely do not change character when the party relocates.

• Pan Fried Chicken, $100. Hot, warm or cold, it works. Nobody has ever complained about cold fried chicken.
• Mac & Cheese, $90. Better indoors if anything, because it stays hot longer without wind on it.
• Pan Caesar Salad, $60. The one cold tray that is supposed to be cold, so a chilly afternoon is not a problem.
• White Rice, $40. The cheapest tray we sell, and the one that turns any protein into a plate.
• Pan Collard Greens, $60. Greens hold heat well and reheat cleanly if the whole thing shifts to the next day.

The trays that need more thought are the ones at their best straight out of the kitchen, and that is worth a section on its own.

Where does fried fish fit in a Memorial Day spread in Crown Heights?

Pan Whiting at $115 is the tray people underrate for a cookout, and it's also the one with the shortest window. Fried fish is excellent early and merely fine late. It doesn't suffer the way it might, but it won't improve while it sits.

So if whiting is on your list, plan for it to be eaten in the first stretch of the party, not saved for stragglers. Put it out first. Let the chicken and the mac carry the back half of the afternoon, since both of those are indifferent to time in a way fish is not.

That sequencing matters more on a day where the plan might move inside halfway through. If it starts raining an hour in and everybody piles into the kitchen, you want the fish already eaten and the trays that hold still holding.

How do you keep trays warm when the party moves inside?

The move indoors is where a good spread usually falls apart, and it is almost always a heat problem rather than a food problem. Trays that were sitting in the sun go on a counter, get covered with foil, and slowly go lukewarm while everybody talks.

A few things help. Keep the foil on until people are eating, and don't air the trays out early. Don't stack pans on top of each other either, because the bottom one cooks and the top one cools. If you have a warm oven, a low setting is enough to hold a pan, and holding is all you're asking it to do. Serve from one tray at a time instead of opening all of them, which is the single most common mistake.

We wrote a longer piece on keeping catering trays warm through a long serving window that goes further into it, and it applies to any indoor gathering, not only a rained-out one.

What should you settle by phone before a Memorial Day order?

Three things, and we'd rather you asked than guessed from a webpage.

How far one full pan goes is the first. It depends on what else is on your table, whether people are eating a plate or picking all afternoon, and how many other dishes are coming from other households. We size that with you on the phone at 718-799-7160 instead of printing a number that would be wrong for most of the people reading it.

How much warning the kitchen needs before a specific date is the second. Ask us about the date you have in mind and you'll get a straight answer for that date.

Whether we can get the food to you or whether you're coming to 1172 Park Place to collect it is the third. That one is a conversation, not a policy line in a blog post.

Planning the rest of the season from the same tray list

Memorial Day is usually the first outdoor gathering of the year, which makes it the one where people are most out of practice. It's also a decent dry run. Whatever combination of trays worked in May tends to be the combination you order again in July and again in September.

If you're already thinking further ahead, the Fourth of July party tray approach for hosts who are grilling themselves is a deliberately smaller order built around sides and starch, and Labor Day weekend catering near Eastern Parkway is the opposite problem again, a house full of guests for several days instead of one afternoon. The whole year laid out in one place sits in our guide to holiday catering across the Brooklyn calendar.

Two proteins, one starch, one cold tray, one rich side. Settle that much before you dial 718-799-7160, and the rest of the call is arithmetic.