Tray Catering Versus Plated Catering for a Brooklyn Event

What is the difference between tray catering and plated catering

Tray catering is food. Plated catering is food plus service.

With trays, a kitchen cooks full pans, you collect or receive them, and you put them out. Guests help themselves. With plated service, a team arrives, brings equipment, portions each plate and carries it to a seated guest, then clears afterwards. The food might be identical. The transaction isn't remotely the same.

That distinction decides more of your budget than any menu choice you'll make later, which is why it's worth settling before you start collecting numbers.

What does each catering format cost you in Brooklyn

Trays are priced as goods. At FreeTown African & American Cuisine, every catering price is a full-pan price, running $40 to $165. A pan of white rice is $40. A pan of lamb is $165. The number covers the food in the pan and nothing is bolted on for how many people are in the room.

Plated service is priced as goods plus labor plus equipment. That usually means several lines, not one. There is the food. There is the team, however many hours they are on site. There is the equipment they bring, and often a charge for bringing it. Some of those lines scale with the guest count and some scale with the length of the event, so the total moves in ways a tray total doesn't.

The honest generalisation is this. Trays give you a fixed number you can add up in advance. Plated service gives you a number that depends on the shape of the day. Neither is automatically better value, but only one of them can be priced from a webpage.

FreeTown sells trays. Whether anything beyond that can be arranged for a particular event is a phone question, and not something to assume from this page.

What does each format cost you in effort

This is where the real trade sits, and it gets skipped.

Tray catering hands you a job. Somebody has to collect or receive the pans, keep them at temperature, set up a table, put out serving spoons and disposables, keep an eye on the trays through the afternoon, and deal with what is left at the end. On a good day that's one organized relative and a folding table. On a bad day it's you, missing your own event.

Plated service takes that job away. You're buying back your own attention for the length of the party, which for some events is the entire point and worth every line on the invoice.

So the question isn't only what you can afford. It's whether you have somebody willing to run the table. If you do, trays are straightforward and the money goes into food. If you don't, the saving is smaller than it looks, because the work doesn't disappear, it lands on you.

There is a practical guide to doing the tray version well in how to set up a buffet table for a party, and it is worth reading before you decide you can handle it.

Which format suits which kind of Brooklyn event

A rough sorting that holds up most of the time.

• Repasts, church functions, graduations, birthdays, block parties and office lunches, where people arrive across a window rather than all at once, tend to work better as trays.
• Anything with a seating chart and a running order tends to want service, because plates have to land at the same time.
• Events in a room you don't control, like a community space with rules about what can be brought in, need the format decided by the venue before anything else.
• Long afternoons where people graze suit trays, because a buffet keeps working without anybody managing it.

Weddings sit awkwardly across the line, and the answer usually depends on whether the reception is a sit-down meal or a long informal party. Wedding reception catering trays in Brooklyn covers the tray version of that decision.

What tray pricing looks like at a Crown Heights kitchen

The full-pan list at 1172 Park Place covers 18 trays across four sections, and every price is published. You can build a spread and total it before you speak to anybody, which is the practical advantage of buying food as goods.

One item shows how a tray total gets built up. FreeTown Pasta is $85 as a pan, and it is the only tray with published add-ons, so it can be moved up or left where it is depending on the rest of the table. The arithmetic on that is in adding chicken, steak or shrimp to a catering pasta tray.

Everything else is a flat number, and the complete Crown Heights catering tray price list has all of it.

What you still have to settle by phone

Three things this page will not pretend to answer.

How many trays your event wants. That depends on how the food is put out and what else is on the table, and no serving count printed on a menu survives contact with a real room. Give somebody your headcount and the occasion and you will get a proper answer.

What arrives with the food. Whether serving utensils, racks, fuel or any setup come with an order is not something to assume from a blog post, in either direction.

And whether any service beyond the trays is possible at all for your date. Ask first. Don't plan around it.

How to make the call

Decide the format first, then price it. If you are collecting numbers from more than one kitchen, make sure they are all quoting the same format, because a tray total and a service total put next to each other will mislead you badly. How to compare two Brooklyn catering quotes fairly walks through getting them onto the same footing.

Then make the call. A few minutes on 718-799-7160 turns a rough plan into an order, and the one thing to have settled before you dial is the format, because everything downstream of it moves.