Holi Catering

Holi is the Hindu festival of colors, and it lands in early spring. Most of what people picture happens outdoors, with dry colored powder. The food comes after, and it is not a catered lunch.

A Holi order is fried snacks and sweets with a cold drink beside them, set out in the afternoon and eaten by hand. Brief the caterer that way. Ask an Indian restaurant for Holi catering and a biryani tray often comes back.

If the office wants a full meal that day, order it as lunch. Indian catering for an ordinary week covers the curries, and how Indian catering is ordered and served has the service formats.

Gujiya is the item that turns a sweets board into a Holi table. It is a fried half-moon dumpling stuffed with khoya, coconut, and chopped nuts. Order it first.

• Jalebi, coiled and syrup-soaked, best within an hour of the fryer
• Samosas and kachori for the savory half of the table
• Dahi bhalla, lentil dumplings under sweetened yogurt, tamarind, and mint
• Pani puri, if the caterer sends shells, filling, and water apart
• Thandai, chilled milk ground with almonds, fennel, cardamom, and saffron

Raise pani puri early. Each shell is filled and eaten in the same few seconds, so it needs somebody at the station doing the filling. Otherwise dahi bhalla does the chaat job and holds.

Keep the sweets narrow. The wider mithai canon belongs to how the office does Diwali. At Holi the board is gujiya, jalebi, and little else.

Dry color powder stains, and it works into keyboards and carpet and stays there. Take the colors outside to a parking lot, a courtyard, or a park, tell people to wear clothes they can lose, then come back in to eat. Or leave the powder out, which is what most offices do.

The date moves. Holi is set by the full moon of Phalguna, so it slides across early spring and never sits on the same weekday twice. Confirm it before you book anything. Other dates on our calendar of catering holidays move the same way.

If the day itself is awkward, take the nearest weekday and set the spread out mid-afternoon, when nobody has to skip a meal for it.

A spread of gujiya, chaat, and thandai prices like a snack break, $5 to $15 a head, because there is no entree under it. The sweets move the number: mithai sells by weight, and a serious gujiya order can outprice the savory half of the table.

It runs vegetarian on its own, since Holi food is mostly meatless before anyone asks, so one table feeds the room. Our guide to food people eat without a fork has the quantities.

Ask CaterAi for a Holi spread and the shortlist is sweet shops and chaat kitchens, not a lunch menu with a dessert bolted on.