Repast Catering in Brooklyn: Food After a Funeral, Handled Simply

What a repast is, and how FreeTown African & American Cuisine helps

A repast is the meal served after a funeral, when family and friends gather to eat together before going back to their lives. Some people call it a repass. FreeTown African & American Cuisine, at 1172 Park Place in Crown Heights, caters this meal with full-pan trays off a published price list, arranged in one phone call to 718-799-7160.

The job of repast food is different from a party. Nobody wants to be in the kitchen that day. The food needs to arrive ready, hold well on a table for a few hours, and let people serve themselves without anyone hosting. Simple, familiar dishes work better here than anything elaborate.

Nothing on this page asks you to fill in a form or wait on a quote. The trays carry prices, so you can see the shape of the order before you call, and the call is where the count gets settled.

What makes repast food work

Good repast food is easy to eat, easy to reheat, and forgiving if the timing shifts by an hour. It shouldn't need a chef in the room. A tray that can sit out, get refilled onto plates, and still taste right an hour later is doing its job. That's the standard FreeTown African & American Cuisine builds its catering trays around, and it's why a handful of items on the menu suit a repast especially well.

Think about how the room behaves. People arrive from the service at different times. Some eat straight away, some stand and talk for an hour first, and a few won't eat at all until somebody puts a plate in their hand. A spread that depends on being served hot at one exact moment fails that room. A spread built from full pans that hold doesn't.

The other quiet requirement is that nobody in the family should have to make decisions. A short table of recognizable dishes lets the people closest to the loss stop planning and sit down. That is why the list below is deliberately plain, and why nothing on it needs explaining to anybody who walks in.

Trays that suit a repast

These are the published full-pan prices, worth confirming on the call.

• Pan Fried Chicken, $100
• Pan Baked Chicken, $100
• Pan Jollof Rice, $85
• White Rice, $40
• Pan Collard Greens, $60
• Mashed Potato, $80
• Mac & Cheese, $90

A common repast spread is one rice, one or two proteins, and a side or two from this list. Fried or baked chicken with collard greens and mac and cheese is a plain, comforting combination that a lot of families reach for. Jollof rice works well alongside it too, if you want something with more color on the table. There's no wrong combination here. The point is food that feeds the room without asking anything of the people in it.

Fried and baked chicken sit at the same $100, which is worth knowing. Ordering one of each costs no more than ordering two of the same, and it covers the people who want the crust and the people who'd rather not have it. White Rice at $40 is the least expensive way to put volume on a table, and Mashed Potato at $80 does the same job for anyone who wants something soft.

Both West African and Southern traditions have long-standing customs around feeding people after a death, and the two lines of this menu grow out of both of those traditions. That is worth knowing, but it is background, not a service FreeTown African & American Cuisine is claiming to perform beyond the food itself.

What to have ready when you call

A few details make the call faster.

• Roughly how many people you are feeding
• The date, the time, and where the food needs to be, whether that is a home, a church, or a funeral home
• Whether you are collecting the trays yourself, and if not, what you want to ask about
• Which trays you are leaning toward, if you already have an idea

None of this needs to be exact. The person answering the phone will help you work out the rest, and a rough range is a perfectly good starting point.

The four questions that come up on every repast call

Almost every repast order raises the same four, and none of them get answered in writing here, because the honest answer changes with the order.

• How many people one full pan feeds. It depends on what else is on the table and on how the room is eating, and any number printed on this page would be a guess dressed up as a fact.
• Whether a small order works for a small gathering. That depends on the day and on what you are ordering.
• How much notice the kitchen needs for your date. Repasts land on short notice more often than not, and your date is the only date that matters.
• Whether the trays can come to you or you're coming to Park Place, and on what terms.

Call 718-799-7160 and all four get settled in the same short conversation. That's a better outcome than reading a confident number off a page and finding out on the morning that it didn't apply to you.

Timing is often short, so call

Repasts are usually arranged on short notice, sometimes just a day or two out. The fastest way to get a straight answer on whether it can be ready in time is to call 718-799-7160 directly and say what you need. A phone conversation will get you further than trying to piece it together online.

If you are arranging this on behalf of someone else, say so on the call. Whoever collects the food doesn't have to be the person who ordered it, and it helps to have both names attached to the order from the start instead of sorting it out at the counter.

Related planning pages

A repast is one of several gatherings fed the same way, off the same tray list.

• How tray catering works for a Brooklyn party explains the full-pan mechanic from the beginning, which is worth reading if you have never ordered food this way before.
• Sunday dinner catering in Brooklyn covers the smaller, plainer family spread, which is often what the days after a funeral call for more than the day itself.
• Church function and family reunion catering in Crown Heights deals with feeding a congregation, frequently the same room and the same people.
• Catering a community room event in Brooklyn is the one to read if the gathering is in a building's community room rather than a house.

Getting in touch

FreeTown African & American Cuisine is at 1172 Park Place, Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Call 718-799-7160 to arrange a repast order. The full tray list is on the FreeTown catering menu if it helps to see everything in one place before you dial.