St. Patrick’s Day Catering

The room expects corned beef and cabbage, so order corned beef and cabbage. Why the plate is Irish American rather than Irish sits on our Irish American Heritage Month catering page.

Three lines to add when you place it.

• Two pans, not one. Cabbage boiled in the beef pot turns up limp and waterlogged after a drive. Ask for it cooked apart and off the heat while it still has bite.
• Sliced across the grain, ladled with its own liquid. Cut the other way it eats stringy, and slices in a dry pan curl at the edges inside an hour.
• Soda bread baked that morning. No yeast means no keeping, so yesterday’s loaf arrives dry.

Potatoes, carrots, and sharp mustard close the plate. The plate lands at themed-lunch rates, $12 to $20 per person, delivery separate.

The instinct is food coloring. Green bagels, green frosting, a green drink. It photographs well, then people eat it, and the table reads like a school cafeteria.

Order food that turns up green on its own:

• Pesto, on pasta or as a sandwich spread
• A herb-heavy salad, or broccolini on the hot line
• Guacamole beside the chips
• Pistachio or matcha for dessert
• A mint shake built on real mint, not syrup

If somebody wants dye anyway, give it one item and let the rest be food.

March 17 is one of the biggest days of the year for American bars and restaurants, which points you at the wrong supplier. The Irish pub down the block is the obvious call, and it is the business with the least left to give you, since its own floor is spoken for from noon onward.

Order from a kitchen whose work that day is delivery rather than table service, and place it several days out. Late to it? What a caterer can still do on short notice is its own subject.

Run it at lunch. The evening of the seventeenth already belongs to somebody else, so a five o’clock office event makes people pick. Noon makes nobody pick: everyone is already on site, and the night stays theirs.

Build the menu food first and it takes in the whole room without a policy. Plenty of people do not drink, and a lunch about the plate never makes them explain that. If there is a toast, make it Irish coffee and pour a whiskey-free one beside it. The drink was invented for cold passengers off a flight in Ireland.

CaterAi checks which kitchens near you still have the seventeenth open. See also what else on the calendar is worth catering.