Diwali Catering

Diwali food is festival food, so the table should look full. Open with something fried: samosas, pakora, and a chaat station if the caterer offers one.

The mains are what separate a Diwali order from a regular Indian lunch:

• A paneer main, paneer tikka or shahi paneer
• One rich curry, korma or dal makhani
• Biryani, which feeds a crowd and looks like an occasion
• Naan, raita, and a sharp kachumber salad

Variety carries the festival, not volume. A long table at normal portions reads as a celebration. Two dishes in bigger pans read as lunch with decorations. Spreads like this commonly run $15 to $25 a head delivered.

Diwali is the sweets holiday. Mithai is how the festival gets shared, in boxes passed between neighbors and colleagues, so a spread without it is an Indian lunch on a special day. Order a board:

• Gulab jamun, served warm
• Jalebi, as fresh from the fryer as you can manage
• Barfi, cut small, including kaju katli
• Ladoo, besan or motichoor

The board also works as the whole celebration. Where lunch is hard to schedule, mithai and masala chai in the late afternoon mark the day on their own, for a few dollars a head. Sweets and tea is how the holiday runs at home anyway.

Diwali follows the lunar calendar, so it moves. It lands between mid-October and mid-November and shifts by a couple of weeks each year, which catches planners working from memory.

The festival runs five days, so the office version does not have to sit on the main night. Take the weekday with the fullest office. Lunch and late afternoon both work, and evening competes with anyone celebrating at home.

Then invite the whole company. A celebration that reaches only the people who already observe Diwali is a lunch for a subset. The food does the explaining, and nobody has to make a case for their own festival. Diwali also opens a busy stretch on the office calendar, and the full holiday catering calendar covers the dates after it.

Diwali spreads skew vegetarian on their own. Plenty of families keep a vegetarian table through the festival, and the canon is mostly meatless already: chaat, paneer, dal, biryani, mithai. That also makes the order simple, since one spread feeds every eater in the room.

Vegans need one more line in the order. Ghee runs through festival cooking and most mithai is built on milk solids, so ask for two labeled vegan items. Chikki, the peanut and jaggery brittle, belongs on a Diwali table anyway.

Our guide to Indian corporate catering is the long version on the cuisine, and Indian catering covers the everyday order. Book the food and the sweets together through CaterAi, one headcount and one delivery window, so the jalebi arrives with the biryani.