What You Still Need to Buy When the Food Is Catered

Ordering trays solves the cooking. It doesn't solve the serving, and the distance between those two things is bigger than most first-time hosts expect.

Catering here is priced and packed by the full pan. What that means in practice is that you're buying cooked food in quantity, and the room it lands in is yours to equip. What comes with an order, what it is packed in and whether anything like spoons or racks is part of it varies by kitchen and by order, so treat that as a question for the phone on 718-799-7160, never an assumption. This list is what a host typically ends up needing regardless of the answer.

What do you need to serve a catered meal in a room of your own?

The short version, in the order you will miss them.

• Serving spoons. Big ones. One per dish, minimum, and they need to be long enough to reach the bottom of a deep pan.
• Plates. Sturdy enough to hold a full plate of rice and a piece of chicken without folding in half.
• Cutlery and napkins, more napkins than you think.
• A folding table or a cleared surface long enough for the trays with space between them.
• Chafing racks and chafing fuel if the food is holding for more than a short while.
• Foil, a full roll of it, for covering, tenting and wrapping.
• Bin bags and somewhere obvious to put them.
• Containers for leftovers, bought before the party.

Everything on that list is cheap. Every single one of them is miserable to be without at the moment you need it.

Which of these do people forget most often?

Serving spoons, by a distance.

A house has two large spoons. A spread of six trays needs six, and they have to be the long-handled kind, not a soup spoon that vanishes into a full pan of rice. Buy a pack of cheap ones or borrow from three neighbors. This is the single most common gap and it's the one that visibly slows a line down, because a shared spoon means people wait for each other at every dish.

Second most forgotten is the bin. A room of people eating off paper plates generates an astonishing amount of rubbish, and without a visible bag at the end of the food table it all ends up on windowsills, chairs and your kitchen counter. Put a bag out before people arrive and it solves itself.

Third is leftover containers. Everybody means to buy them and everybody buys them the day after. Have them in a cupboard before the event.

What do you need for keeping the food hot?

A chafing rack, a water tray, fuel and a lighter. That set is the whole apparatus, and it's what separates food that is still hot in the second hour from food that is not.

Count on a rack per tray you want to keep hot, and count fuel generously. Two canisters under a full pan is standard, and running out mid-event is a fixable problem only if you bought spares. Have a lighter, not matches, and put it somewhere you'll find it.

If a rack is not an option, a domestic oven on its lowest setting with foil-covered pans holds food reasonably well for a while. The mechanics of both, including which dishes go soft under a tight lid and which do not, are covered in keeping catering trays warm through a long event.

Whether any of this comes with a catering order, or whether the trays arrive hot or packed to be reheated, is worth settling on the call. It changes what you buy.

What does the table itself need?

More space than you have planned for.

Full pans are wide, and a table that fits six of them edge to edge is a table nobody can serve from. Leave a hand's width between trays so there is room for a spoon to come out without dragging through the neighboring dish, and leave a clear landing zone at the start of the table for the plate stack.

You also want a second surface. Somewhere for empty pans to go, somewhere for the drinks that are not competing with the food line, and somewhere for a spare stack of plates. A folding table costs very little and solves all three. Where each of those goes, and which arrangement moves a line fastest, is the subject of laying out a buffet table so a long line keeps moving.

What about plates, and how many?

Buy more than your headcount, always. People take a second plate rather than reusing the first one, and a plate that folds under the weight of a serving of rice will cost you a whole plate anyway. The sturdy ones are worth the small extra outlay, especially for a standing room where people eat holding the plate instead of resting it on a table.

The same padding logic applies to cutlery, cups and napkins. These are the cheapest things in the whole event and the most annoying to run out of. If you're already ordering with a guest list that hasn't settled, planning a catering order without a final headcount covers the same principle on the food side, which is to put the uncertainty into the cheap items rather than the expensive ones.

Is there anything else worth having on hand?

A few small things that come up every time.

• A sharp knife and a board, for anything that needs cutting down at the table.
• Kitchen roll and a cloth, because something will spill on the serving table within the first ten minutes.
• Tape and a marker if you want to label the dishes. In a room where people are eating food they may not recognize, a written label saves the person serving from answering the same question thirty times, which matters more than it sounds when the room has genuinely mixed tastes.
• A tray or a flat box in the car, if you are collecting the food yourself.

None of this is expensive and all of it is boring, which is exactly why it gets left until the day. Buy it in one trip the week before, put it all in one bag, and the day of the event becomes what it should be, which is opening trays and getting out of the way.

If you're still at the stage of building the order, the full ordering sequence from first call to collection covers the call itself, including the questions about packing and what comes with a tray. Ask those while you have somebody on the line and you'll know exactly what is on your own shopping list.