As you put together your event and think about the food you want to serve your guests, whether it’s for a wedding or just a private party, here are a few things to think about:

1. How the meal is served: will food be served reception-style, buffet, traditional plated, or family-style? This has a lot of impact on how your event feels. There seems to be a lot of interest in family-style meals (we love these), but keep in mind that family-style meals typically mean more serving plates (more rentals = higher cost) and typically larger tables. Buffets can actually be more expensive due to the quantity of food. And as you’ve probably experienced, traditional plated meals can be more formal.

2. What season is your event in? We always try to use seasonally-appropriate ingredients, not only because it is better all around (cheaper for you, better for the environment, etc), but seasonally-appropriate foods also help to give an event a certain oomph. Just think: what would summer be without tomatoes?

3. What’s your budget? The biggest factor in this is the number of guests. After you get a sense of headcount, figure out how much you can realistically spend per person and then what parts of the menu are most important to you — a recreation of your mother’s famous lasagna, or those blinis.

4. What’s your venue like? Some venues have kitchens, while at others have little to no kitchen facilities. Some foods are best when served right after cooking. While we’ll ultimately be guiding you once we have more information from your venue, it’s always good for you to know what your venue can handle.

To get started planning your event’s menu, feel free to contact us.

We thought we could take this opportunity to explain how we “do” weddings. Typically, after clients contact us, we’ll get started putting together a custom menu. After a menu has been agreed upon, we invite our clients to come down to Red Table in Brooklyn for a tasting — that way we can meet and get to know one another over some good food and wine. After the tasting, we’ll typically revisit the menu and come up with a proposal. And that’s it!

Over the years, we’ve worked with a lot of local venues and vendors, whether it’s photographers, lighting specialists, event planners and so on. Check out our New York wedding planning resources guide or the Red Table blog for more.

One of the cornerstones of our business is a home delivery service. I feel lucky to be able cook in this way every week. It gives me and all of the cooks at Red Table the opportunity to do something very rare in the catering world. Rather than always making 2000 pieces of an hors d’ouevre day in and day out it allows us to make a huge variety of dishes on a small scale. Some of these dishes (our beer battered fried cod, three cheese lasagna, bar b-q brisket with slaw etc.) we make every week, but plenty of others (this week lamb tagine w/ tomato couscous, vegan challa, samosas, the kings paella, roasted corn soup, mixed sushi for example) are weekly specials and give us the opportunity to work with a variety of ingredients and cusines that we might not be as conversant with otherwise.

Another aspect of the weekly drop off that I appreciate is many of our clients or members of their families have very strict dietary restrictions (allergies, pregnancy, new mothers, or just taste preferences) that constanntly challenge us to make traditional dishes (dairy free low fat cream spinach, but trust me it’s delicious) using restricted ingredients but with the same goal of fantastic all natural dishes.

For more about our weekly drop offs check out our page on home meal delivery or feel free to contact us.