Immigrant-Owned Catering

Narrowing a catering search to immigrant-owned kitchens sounds like it shrinks the menu. Run it against what the team already eats and almost nothing comes off the table.

• The taqueria that handles the Tuesday order.
• The deli counter stacking pastrami on rye.
• The tray of baked ziti. The pizza beside it.
• The falafel counter, the dumpling house, the noodle shop.

Plenty of them cook American food outright. Vesna Kahriman’s family fled Montenegro in 1992 and opened a deli in San Mateo in 2011. It sells signature sandwiches, Philly cheesesteaks and burgers. The Montenegrin part is the garlic and herb spread inside them, a family recipe she spent a year rebuilding, and she tells it herself.

The filter is not picking a cuisine. It picks a first-generation kitchen, where the menu is a first language.

No region organizes this list. That makes it the widest one in the directory, and the place to look when the office says it has had everything.

• Georgian. Khachapuri, cheese-filled bread that arrives as whole loaves and gets cut at the table. Badrijani, eggplant rolled around walnut paste, served cool.
• Uzbek. Plov, rice cooked down with lamb, carrot and cumin in one wide pan, the way it is cooked for a crowd anyway. Samsa, baked meat pastries, hold for hours.
• Russian. Pelmeni and vareniki by the tray, stroganoff over noodles.

The hesitation rarely survives one lunch. Varvara at Babushka near San Francisco named it as her hardest problem: people are afraid of Russian food, and most turn into regulars after the first visit. The full ownership directory shows which of these your city has.

Varvara names the real barrier: the room has to eat it once. A first order is a scheduling problem more than a menu one.

• Give it a plain weekday. A kitchen nobody has tried does not belong on the all-hands, where a thin turnout reads as a verdict on the food.
• Send an anchor. One legible dish next to the unfamiliar one, a rice, a bread, a grilled protein, keeps the new thing a choice rather than an obligation.
• Skip the vote. A poll about a cuisine nobody has eaten returns the cuisine everybody has eaten. Choose it, order it, and count the trays afterward.

Three do have a month of their own. Irish American in March, Jewish American in May, Italian American in October, each with the origin story behind the food.

The rest of the list has no date attached. Nobody proclaims a Georgian month, so nothing pushes the orders into one fortnight. That kitchen is as free in April as in November.

Which shortens the lead time. Two weeks is generous for a tray order here and one usually works. Give CaterAi the address, the headcount and the date, and it answers with the kitchens that will actually drive to you.