Ordering Catering by Phone When Everything Else Is an App

You can order one plate of food in eleven seconds without speaking to anybody. Ordering eight trays for a room of people is a different kind of transaction, and it still goes through a phone call. For catering from 1172 Park Place in Crown Heights, that call is 718-799-7160.

This annoys people. It shouldn't. The reason is worth understanding, because once you see it, the call stops feeling like friction and starts feeling like the part that saves you.

Why is catering ordered by phone when a single plate is ordered by app?

A plate order has no unknowns. You pick a thing, it has a price, it goes in a bag, somebody brings it to a door. Every variable is already decided before you open the app.

A catering order has almost nothing decided. How many people are coming is a guess. What kind of eating it is, a full meal or grazing, changes the whole shape of the order. Whether the room has an oven, a table, an outlet, a lift. What time the food has to be in the room versus what time people will touch it. Whether the person collecting it drives.

None of that fits in a text field, and the honest reason is that you don't know the answers well enough to type them. You know them well enough to talk about them. A form asks you to commit to numbers you're still guessing at. A conversation lets you say "somewhere around forty, maybe fifty, it is a repast so people will eat once and go" and have the other person do something useful with it.

What does the call get you that a form does not?

Four things, roughly, and they all happen inside about ninety seconds.

• Quantity sizing. You say what the event is, the kitchen tells you what an order that size usually looks like in trays, and you adjust it live instead of guessing and hoping.
• Correction. When you say the spread out loud, the person on the other end hears that you've got two starches and nothing green, and says so.
• The date. Whether a particular Saturday works, and what time on it, is a real-time question. No published answer survives contact with a calendar.
• The specifics only you have. One guest avoids peanuts. The room is on the third floor of a walkup. Your aunt won't eat anything she can't identify. Those are the things that decide whether the day works, and they are exactly the things that get lost in a dropdown.

That's why the call is short. Everything in it is stuff a form couldn't have taken from you anyway.

Do you have to call blind, or can you plan first?

Plan first. Nothing about the phone call means you're walking in without information.

The catering menu is published with the prices on it, and every price is a full pan price. Trays run from $40 for White Rice to $165 for Pan Lamb or Lamb Suya, with things like the $85 pan of Jollof Rice, the $100 pan of Fried Chicken and the $90 pan of Mac and Cheese in between. You can read the whole thing at the FreeTown catering menu, build the spread you want, add it up and then call to sanity-check it.

That's a meaningfully different experience from a caterer who hides everything behind a request form and calls you back in a day and a half with a number. If you want the argument for published prices spelled out, quote forms versus published catering prices makes it properly.

So the sequence is: read, build, then call. The call is confirmation and correction, not discovery. The full ordering sequence from first call to collection sets out what to have in front of you when you dial.

What should you have ready before you dial 718-799-7160?

Write four things on a piece of paper.

• The occasion, in three words. Repast. Office lunch. Sweet sixteen.
• The date, and the time the food needs to be in the room.
• A rough headcount, stated as a range.
• The trays you think you want, with a note of which ones you are unsure about.

Then add your own questions. There are more of them than most people realize, and the questions worth asking any caterer before you commit is a working list you can read off. Ask about how much notice the kitchen needs for your date, whether there's a smallest order they'll take, and whether the food can be brought to you or whether you're collecting. Those three have no published answer anywhere, here or at most kitchens in the borough, because all three depend on the date and the order.

Is the phone slower than clicking a button?

For one plate, obviously. For eight trays, no, and it isn't close.

Think about what the alternative involves. A form that can't ask you a follow-up question produces an order that's wrong in ways nobody notices until the food is in the room. Then you're on the phone anyway, except now it's the morning of the event and the trays are already made. The call was never the slow part. The call is the part that stops the slow part from happening.

There is one more piece of the plan that the same conversation settles, which is how the food gets from Park Place to wherever you are. That is worth deciding before you call rather than during, and collecting catering yourself versus arranging to have it brought covers what each option costs you in a borough where parking is its own event.

Once the order is placed and read back to you, the food side is done. What's left is the room, the table and the spoons, which is the part nobody warns you about.