Irish American Heritage Month Catering

The office orders corned beef and cabbage in March. Order it. The story is better than the reputation.

Ireland’s version of that plate is bacon and cabbage: cured pork, boiled potatoes, no beef anywhere near it. The families who crowded onto New York’s Lower East Side found pork expensive and rent worse. A few doors down, kosher butchers were curing beef brisket in barrels and selling it cheap. So the cooks bought brisket, boiled it the way they had always boiled the bacon, and set the cabbage beside it.

Two immigrant kitchens on one block produced the most Irish dish in America. The rest of the Irish table stays unordered.

The canon offices never see is coastal, plain, and easy to deliver.

• Seafood chowder. Potato, leek, smoked haddock, salmon, cream. Ireland is an island and this is what the island cooks. It ships in an urn and pours into cups.
• Brown bread. Wholemeal soda bread, dense and faintly sweet, cut thick. The cheapest item you will order, and what makes everything beside it read as Irish.
• Boxty. A griddled potato pancake, softer than a latke. A side, not a station.
• Irish stew. Lamb, onion, carrot, and potato in a thin broth rather than a gravy.

The stew needs one instruction. An hour over a flame does the lamb no harm and ruins the potato, which softens, breaks apart, then thickens the broth into paste. Ask for the potato cut large and the pot pulled early.

Every component of a full Irish sits on a standard hot breakfast setup: eggs, rashers, sausage, grilled tomato, mushrooms, baked beans, and toast or a soda farl. Any breakfast caterer builds most of it from stock.

Black and white pudding is the part to order on purpose. Black pudding is blood sausage, white pudding is not, and neither reads as breakfast to an American office. One small pan of each, both labeled, and the volume in eggs and rashers.

Expect $18 to $28 per person, the ordinary hot breakfast price with no holiday premium. Line order and holding times sit on our page on how a breakfast buffet runs, and what an office breakfast costs by format covers the cold options.

March 17 belongs to the party, and the party has a page of its own: St. Patrick’s Day office catering.

The heritage month is the other thirty days. A chowder and brown bread lunch on a Wednesday in the second week reads as intent. That same food on the seventeenth reads as obligation.

Irish restaurants also do their biggest business of the year around the seventeenth, so a delivery that week gets whatever is left.

Hand CaterAi a date and a headcount and it lists the kitchens near you that cook this food. The rest of the holiday catering calendar picks up in April.