20 Best Finger Foods for Corporate Catering That You Need To Know

Finger food is what you order when the room has to keep moving. Nobody hunts for a seat, nobody hands out cutlery, nobody balances a plate on their knee. People take one, keep talking, and come back for another.

That makes it the safest choice for most events in an office — a Monday briefing, an all-day training room, a farewell at four, a launch where half the guests are standing. Below are twenty finger food ideas worth putting on the table, and, just as usefully, what each one is actually like to serve to a group of thirty.

20 Finger Foods to Try for Corporate Catering

1. Nachos and Tacos

Corn chips with cheese sauce, tomato and guacamole, plus a few small folded tacos alongside. Assemble late: nachos go soft within about twenty minutes of meeting the sauce, so send the components separately and let people build their own. Mini tacos are the easier half of this pair, because they hold their shape while somebody walks and talks.

2. Potato mozzarella balls

Crumbed, fried, and best in the first half hour while the cheese inside is still soft. After that they are still good, just less dramatic. A pot of garlic mayonnaise or sour cream on the side does most of the work, and one ball is a genuine single bite, which is the whole point.

3. Pizza sticks

You do not need pizza dough. Bread cut into fingers, topped with tomato, cheese and herbs, then baked until the edges crisp. They hold at room temperature better than a real pizza slice, they need no plate, and they are the cheapest way to put something hot-looking on the table.

4. Vietnamese Spring Rolls - Gỏi Cuốn

Rice paper, vermicelli, prawn, lettuce and herbs, served cold with a dipping sauce. This is the one item that looks generous and eats light, which matters when the rest of the table is fried. Lay them in a single layer and never stack them — the wrappers stick to each other within minutes.

5. Vietnamese Fried Rolls - Chả Giò

The fried cousin of the roll above, filled with pork or beef instead of prawn. The rule with these is air: serve them in an open tray with lettuce, never covered, or the steam trapped underneath softens the shell and you lose the only thing that made them worth ordering.

6. Japanese Karaage pops

Boneless fried chicken in single bites. What separates karaage from ordinary chicken pieces is sake in the marinade, which gives it depth without heat — safe for a mixed room. No bones means no debris, which is a real consideration when the table is also the meeting table.

7. Chinese Pork Buns

Soft steamed buns with barbecue pork inside. These are the most forgiving item on the list: they are perfectly good lukewarm, so they survive the gap between delivery and the moment people actually stop talking and start eating. Keep them in the steamer basket and they stay soft for an hour.

8. Korean Kimbap

Seaweed, rice, ham, egg, cucumber and carrot, rolled and sliced. Kimbap travels better than almost anything else here because it is designed to be packed. Ask for it cut close to serving time though — the cut faces dry out first, and a dry edge is the only way this dish disappoints.

9. Tteokboki With Fishcakes

Chewy rice cakes and fishcake in a sweet chilli sauce. This is the one item on the list that is not finger food at all — it needs a bowl and a fork. Include it when you know the room will sit down, and skip it when they will not, however much your team asks for it.

10. Skewers

Deliberately unspecified, because the skewer is a format rather than a recipe: cheese and olive, chicken and capsicum, beef, halloumi, fruit. The stick is the plate, the handle and the portion size all at once, which makes this the most under-rated choice for a room with nowhere to put anything down.

11. Onigiri Rice Balls

Rice pressed around a filling — tuna, chicken, pickled plum — with a band of seaweed. Onigiri holds for hours without refrigeration and without looking tired, which no fried item on this list can claim. Wrap the seaweed separately if you can; it softens against the rice.

12. Sliders

A full burger at a quarter of the size. Pin every one with a skewer or they come apart in transit, and assemble as late as possible so the bun does not take on moisture from the patty. Done properly they are the item people photograph, which is worth something at a launch.

13. Assorted Tarts

Custard, berry, lemon, chocolate — a tray of small tarts is the safest sweet you can put out. Pastry holds all afternoon, nothing melts, nothing needs a fork, and the variety means you are not betting the whole dessert course on one flavour that half the room dislikes.

14. Calamari & Onion Rings

Delicious, and the shortest window on this list. Crumbed seafood is excellent for about fifteen minutes and ordinary after thirty. Order it only when the food and the people arrive at the same time. If the timing is uncertain, spend the money on something that does not depend on it.

15. Mini quesadillas bites

Tortilla, melted cheese, whatever else you like, cut into eighths. Good warm, still good cold, and easy to make vegetarian without anyone noticing it was a compromise. Cutting them small matters more than it sounds: a full wedge needs two hands and a plate, an eighth needs neither.

16. Mini Corndogs

A sausage in batter on a stick. Nobody will pretend this is sophisticated, and that is exactly why it works at a casual event, a family day or an afternoon where the guests include somebody's children. Serve with mustard and tomato sauce and they will go before the tarts do.

17. Mini quiche

The workhorse of office catering. Quiche is good hot, good at room temperature, holds its shape in a box, and turns vegetarian without becoming a lesser option. If you can only choose one item on this page for a group of thirty strangers, choose this one.

18. Mini cupcakes/ cake slices

Small enough that people take one without deciding whether they want dessert. That is the trick with sweets at a work event — a full slice is a commitment and a mini is not, so more of the tray actually gets eaten and less of it goes back to the kitchen.

19. Smores

Biscuit, toasted marshmallow, chocolate. This one has to be built on the day, close to serving, or the chocolate sets and the marshmallow goes firm. Treat it as a novelty for an afternoon that needs a talking point, not as a dessert you can rely on.

20. Fruits and nuts mix

The item that stops the table reading as a wall of pastry. Fruit and nuts cost the least, need no preparation, keep for the whole event, and are the thing people come back to at four o'clock when they have had enough of everything else. Never leave them off.

Simplicity is Creativity

Look back over the twenty and the pattern is obvious: the ones that work in an office are the ones that ask nothing of the room. One hand. No cutlery. No decision. The elaborate items are not better, they are just harder to eat standing up.

So build the table around three or four things that hold — quiche, skewers, tarts, rice paper rolls — and add the fried items only if you know the food and the guests arrive together. A tray that is still good an hour later beats a tray that was spectacular for fifteen minutes.

If you would rather not think about any of it, that is what we are for. Our corporate catering range is built for Brisbane offices: order online by 4pm and it arrives the next day with no last-minute surcharge, delivery starts at $19 on orders from $150 across more than 50 suburbs, and Saturday is the same rate. Everything is made by hand in our Fortitude Valley kitchen the morning it goes out.