Labor Day Catering

Labor Day is a federal holiday. The office is closed, so there is nobody to feed, and the meal has to move.

It moves to the Thursday or Friday of the week leading in, which makes an office Labor Day a send-off for summer rather than an observance.

Friday is the obvious pick and the riskier one. It is also the day people bolt a vacation day on to stretch the weekend to four, so the room can land under your headcount. Check the time-off calendar before you choose. Thursday gives up the symbolism and keeps the room full.

This is the last cookout of the season, and the order should read that way. Grilled and smoked mains, then the sides with an expiry date on them: corn, watermelon, tomatoes worth eating raw, stone fruit, ice cream. None of it belongs on a November menu, which is the point.

A delivered BBQ order for an office runs $18 to $30 a person, fees included. The quantities behind that figure, and the two ways smokehouses sell the food, sit on our BBQ catering page.

Keep it recognizable. A Labor Day lunch nobody could date has missed its own occasion.

Two things squeeze this week at once.

The summer rush has not cleared. Grill and smoker kitchens have been busy since June, and Labor Day sits at the closing edge of that run rather than past it. The notice that works in October will not hold here.

The holiday also takes a Monday out of the caterer’s week. Prep that would have spread over five days lands in four, and every office wanting a send-off wants the same two delivery windows. Thursday lunch fills first.

Book earlier than an ordinary lunch, and name your window when you order. If the kitchen you wanted is gone, move a day earlier instead of cutting the order.

The week after the holiday is four days long, everybody is back, and nothing is booked yet. It is the best planning hour of the quarter, and almost nobody spends it.

September opens up for kitchens once the summer work clears, so the fall dates are still there:

• Hispanic Heritage Month catering, which opens September 15 and wants its kitchens booked first.
• Oktoberfest catering in late September, the first themed lunch of the fall.
• The Q4 run. The office holiday catering calendar lists those dates in order.

Hand CaterAi both the headcount and the dates, and it prices the fall in one pass. What the menus turn into once the grill is away is in our post on seasonal fall catering menus.