Sunday Dinner Catering in Crown Heights for a Full House

Can you order Sunday dinner for a full house in Brooklyn?

You can, and the person who should be reading this isn't the one placing the order. It's whoever has been cooking Sunday dinner for the family every week for years and has never once sat down to eat it hot.

That's the case for catering a Sunday table. Not a special occasion, not a holiday, just the standing weekly meal bought instead of made, so the cook gets a Sunday. FreeTown African & American Cuisine is a family catering kitchen at 1172 Park Place in Crown Heights, and everything on our list is priced by the full pan, which is exactly the format a Sunday table runs on.

What goes on a Crown Heights Sunday table?

The spread everybody already knows, which is the point. Nobody wants Sunday dinner reinvented.

• Pan Baked Chicken at $100. The center of the plate. Baked, not fried, because a Sunday table is a sit-down meal and baked chicken holds through a long one.
• Pan Collard Greens at $60. The Southern green on the list. This is the dish that decides whether the table thinks the food is any good, and it's one of the cheapest trays we make.
• Mac and Cheese at $90. There's no negotiating this. Somebody in the house will notice immediately if it's missing.
• Mashed Potato at $80. The other starch, and the one the youngest and oldest people at the table will both go for.
• White Rice at $40. Forty dollars for a whole pan. It stretches everything else and it's the plate half the family builds from.

That shape, one protein, one green, two starches and a rice, is what a Sunday table runs on. How many pans of each your house needs is the one thing this page can't tell you, so settle it on the call. What the list above does give you is the thinking, already done, so nobody has to stand in a kitchen deciding what a Sunday looks like.

Why buy it instead of cooking it?

Because the cost of Sunday dinner isn't the groceries.

It's a Saturday shop, a morning in a hot kitchen, and a person who spends the meal getting up to fetch things and eating what is left at the end. Families notice the food every week. Very few notice the price of it being made by the same pair of hands every Sunday for years on end.

Buying the spread once doesn't end anything. It gives one person a Sunday in a chair, at their own table, with the food already on it. Then they can go back to cooking it next week if they want to, and if they don't want to, they now know they have a choice.

What does a full Sunday spread cost in Brooklyn?

Every number in this post is a full-pan price, sometimes called a party tray. Not a plate, not a serving. Don't multiply them by how many people are coming.

Across our whole catering list, trays run from $40 to $165. A Sunday dinner order sits almost entirely in the bottom half of that, because the classic Sunday dishes are the ones on the cheaper end of the menu. That's one of the better-kept facts about tray catering: the food people love most isn't the food that costs most.

If you want the full spread with prices in front of you before you decide, all eighteen trays are on the FreeTown catering menu.

How many trays does a full house need?

Here's where we stop guessing, because we'd rather be useful than confident.

We don't publish how many people a full pan feeds. That number depends on how many trays are on the table, how many are children, and whether people are going back for a second plate, which at Sunday dinner they are. Any figure we printed would be wrong for half the houses reading it.

So call 718-799-7160. Tell us how many are usually at the table and which of these dishes your family goes for hardest, and we'll size the order with you. Two other things worth asking on the same call: what time we can have it ready for your date, and whether we can deliver it and on what terms. Both depend on the day, so ask. Assuming is how a Sunday goes sideways.

What do you do with what is left?

Plan for leftovers, because a Sunday order produces them by design and that is half the value. The Monday and Tuesday after a catered Sunday are the quiet argument in favour of the whole idea.

Get the trays broken down and into containers while people are still there to help, not at eleven at night by yourself. Rice, greens and mac and cheese all come back well the next day. We put the practical detail in storing and reheating catering leftovers, which is worth two minutes before the trays land rather than after.

Ordering a Sunday spread from 1172 Park Place

FreeTown is a family kitchen with roots in Freetown, Sierra Leone, cooking West African and Southern food from a single catering list. In Crown Heights that matters at a Sunday table more than anywhere else, because a lot of houses around here have both traditions in the family, and until now feeding them both meant two kitchens and two orders.

One call does it. 718-799-7160, the date, and a rough count of who is genuinely going to be at that table.

For the wider picture of how full-tray ordering works, start with party catering in Brooklyn. If you want the food specifically framed around the Southern side of the menu, soul food catering in Brooklyn goes deeper on those dishes. If the family gathering is a christening instead of a standing Sunday, baptism and christening reception catering in Brooklyn fits better, and if you are feeding people after a funeral, repast catering in Brooklyn is written for that day with the care it needs.