The Questions to Ask a Caterer Before You Hand Over a Date

Most catering goes wrong for boring reasons. The food was fine and there wasn't enough of it. The trays came cold because nobody said who was collecting them. The room needed two serving points and had one. Almost none of that is a cooking problem, and almost all of it is findable in a five minute phone call before you commit.

Here is the call. Group the questions, ask them in order, and write the answers on the same piece of paper you wrote the guest list on.

What should you ask about quantity?

This is the question everybody wants answered on a website and nobody can honestly answer there.

The reason a straight number is rare is that the honest answer depends on the room. A pan of rice next to five other trays goes further than the same pan when it is one of three. A repast where people eat once behaves differently from a birthday where they graze for hours. Any caterer who gives you a confident single number without asking what the event is has guessed.

What you want is not a number on a page. It is a person who asks you two questions back and then tells you what they would order. Here that conversation happens on 718-799-7160, and it is the reason catering orders still go through a phone call rather than a form.

What should you ask about timing before you book a Brooklyn caterer?

Timing questions are the ones that ruin a day when they go unasked, because they are all invisible until the morning of.

That last one is worth asking plainly. A kitchen with three orders going out the same afternoon isn't being difficult when it gives you a narrow window. It's telling you something useful.

What should you ask about getting the food to your room?

The gap between a kitchen and a room is where more catering is lost than in any oven. A stack of full pans is heavier and wider than people expect, and a car with one flat surface handles it very differently from one without. Ask these four questions early, because the answers change which of the two options you should be arguing for.

What should you ask about money?

Published prices help enormously, and you should notice which kitchens have them. Where a full menu of tray prices is on the page, you can build most of the order before you call, and the conversation is about quantity instead of cost. Where there is only a quote form, you're into a back and forth before you know whether it's even in range.

Ask anyway:

That last question deserves a sentence of its own. Dates move. Somebody gets sick, a venue double-books, weather turns. You want to know what the kitchen does about it before it happens, not after, and you want the answer from the person who'll be picking up the phone that day.

For the price side of the comparison, including why one kitchen quoting by the tray and another quoting a headcount number are hard to line up, see how to compare catering prices across Brooklyn.

What should you ask about the food itself?

Not the marketing. The specifics.

These are ordinary questions and a kitchen should be able to answer all of them without hedging. If yours can't tell you what's in a tray, that is your answer.

The peanut question in particular needs asking directly and by name, because West African cooking uses groundnuts in ways that aren't obvious from a dish name. Ask, get a specific reply, and pass it on to whoever needs it.

What should you ask about serving?

Assume nothing here. Most tray catering, most places, is exactly what it says it is: pans of cooked food, handed over. So ask the question in its widest form, which is what comes with the order and what does not, right down to whether the folding table and the trash bags are on your list or somebody else's. That is not a complaint about caterers. It is a planning question, and hosts who ask it in advance have a much better day than hosts who find out at four in the afternoon that they have one large spoon.

What does a good answer sound like?

Short and specific. "That depends on your room, how many are you having?" is a good answer. "It feeds about a dozen" delivered instantly, with no questions asked back, is a worse one, because it can't be true for every event.

You're listening for whether the person on the phone is thinking about your event or reciting a script. That's genuinely most of what this call is for. The menu you can read yourself. The judgement is what you're buying.

When you are ready to make the call, the full ordering sequence for Brooklyn catering sets out what to have in front of you first, and feeding a room where everyone grew up eating something different covers how to pick the trays once quantity is settled. If your guest list is still moving, ordering without a final headcount is the one to read before you call.