Holiday Party Catering

Four formats cover nearly every office holiday party, and the first fork is lunch or evening.

• Drop-off lunch, $25 to $35 per person. Buffet delivered, no staff. Best under 75 people, or when evening turnout is shaky.
• Staffed lunch buffet, $40 to $55 per person. Chafers plus two or three servers. The mid-size default.
• Evening reception with heavy passed appetizers, $60 to $90 per person. Trays plus a station or two, built for mingling.
• Seated three-course dinner, $90 to $150 per person. Plated courses, table staff. Save it for a milestone year.

Pick the time of day first, then the service level. Our holiday party planning guide works through all four in depth, plus the venue and alcohol calls.

The full spread runs $25 to $150 per person, and format sets the tier. December peak pricing runs above off-peak, so a staffed buffet in mid-December costs more than the identical order in January.

Service level moves the price more than the menu does. An offsite venue adds $2,000 to $15,000 in rental on top of catering. Alcohol at $25 to $60 per person, and service charges at 18 to 22 percent, sit outside the per-head price. NYC and San Francisco run 25 to 40 percent above those ranges.

December demand stacks against fixed kitchen capacity. The dates everyone wants, the second and third weeks plus the Thursday and Friday lunch slots, book out roughly 12 weeks ahead in every major city. That puts the real booking window in September and early October.

Bigger and more staffed means earlier. A drop-off lunch for 30 can still land four to five weeks out. A seated dinner wants the full 12 weeks and sometimes more, and an offsite venue gets locked before the caterer.

Starting late, two fallbacks work: run lunch instead of evening, where capacity is deeper, or move the party to January. CaterAi shows what December still has open and builds the menu around it.

For a reception, count 10 to 12 passed pieces per person over two hours, and 14 to 16 when the appetizers replace dinner. Four to six varieties in rotation is plenty, and two of them should eat like a meal.

For a buffet, order 1.25 plates per head and weight the extra toward salads and starches. They absorb a second trip better than the main does.

Dessert counts in bites, not slices: two or three per person.

Running a full December, not one party? Christmas catering has its own playbook, and holiday catering by occasion holds the rest.