Quick Catering Check List For The Last Minute Office Party

A last-minute office party is not a cooking problem. The kitchen can make the food, and has made it several thousand times. What makes the week feel impossible is that one person, usually the person least able to say no, now owns a head count, a room, a budget, a delivery window and somebody's dietary requirement, and owns all of it in the gaps of an ordinary working day.

The useful thing to know, from the delivery side of the counter, is that the food is almost never what runs out of time. Order before 4pm and it arrives the next day, and there is no last-minute surcharge for ordering late, because a Wednesday order and a Thursday order cost the kitchen the same to make. Nearly everything that actually goes wrong at an office party was decided days earlier and had nothing to do with the menu: the count was guessed, the food landed at the wrong hour, the table was too small, or nobody at the building knew it was coming.

So a checklist earns its keep, and it earns it most when it is written in the order decisions have to be made rather than the order they occur to you. Each item below unlocks the next one. Work them in sequence and the ordering takes about ten minutes at the end, because by then every question the kitchen is going to ask you has already been answered.

A written list has a second job that nobody plans for. Office parties get handed over. The person organising it gets pulled into a client meeting on the afternoon, goes home sick the day before, or is simply in the wrong building when the delivery arrives. A list on a shared drive can be picked up by a colleague in about two minutes: what has been booked, what has been paid, what is arriving and when, and who is expecting it at the door. What is in your head cannot be handed to anybody.

It is also the only honest way to see the shape of the budget while there is still time to change it. Written down, a party is four numbers rather than a feeling, and it is normally the decorations and the giveaways that quietly eat the money, not the food.

So now that you know what you are actually buying, here are the office party catering checklists to guide you on your last-minute office party.

1. Determine your type of guests

Office parties do not only involve employees. Management invites business partners, clients and the occasional guest speaker, and the moment somebody from outside the building is in the room the food stops being an internal perk and starts being a first impression. That changes what you order more than it changes how much.

Start with the count, because everything else scales off it, and count the right thing. The number that matters is the number of people physically in the building at the hour the food lands, not the number on the invitation. Two of them are on leave, one is at a client site, and the part-timers do not work Fridays. Order to the desks that will be occupied and you will be close. Order to the invite list and you will have three untouched platters at 4pm and a conversation about waste.

Then convert people into portions rather than guessing at platters. For a working lunch, sandwiches run about one and a half rounds a head. If there is anything else on the table, one round a head is plenty. Finger food is four to six pieces a head when it is a graze alongside drinks, and eight to ten when it is standing in for lunch. Those numbers hold across a surprisingly wide range of rooms, and they hold better than the instinct to double everything because you are nervous.

Appetite is not evenly distributed and it is worth being blunt about it. Children eat less than you think and teenagers eat more than seems possible, so a family day event needs variety rather than volume. A room of tradespeople coming in off a site at eleven eats differently from a room of office staff who had breakfast at their desks. If the party is for a milestone with partners and older relatives invited, expect lighter eating and more interest in the tea and the sweets than the mains.

Dietary requirements are the part that goes wrong quietly. The person who cannot eat what is on the table almost never says so in front of colleagues; they take a piece of fruit, say they are fine, and remember it. Ask by message rather than in the room, and ask for specifics rather than a show of hands, because vegetarian, vegan, gluten free and dairy free are four different orders. Our dietary requirements are marked in the product names for exactly this reason, so you can see what a platter is before it arrives rather than after. The rule that works is one whole item everybody can eat, not a token plate set apart at the end of the table with somebody's name on it.

If you do survey the office, make it answerable in one tap. Three options and a deadline will get you eighty per cent of replies by lunchtime. An open question about what everyone feels like eating will get you nine replies, four of them jokes, and you will end up deciding it yourself anyway.

2. Identify what kind of event

The kind of occasion decides the budget, and it decides it before anybody looks at a menu. A routine birthday for one person needs a cake and ten minutes around the kitchen bench. A team result worth marking needs an afternoon tea. A company Christmas party or an end-of-year event needs food, decorations, prizes and somebody to run the games, and the food is usually the smallest line on that list rather than the biggest.

Name the event honestly, because the format follows from it. A stand-up gathering in a breakout space wants everything to work in one hand, with no plate and no cutlery, so people keep talking instead of queueing at a table. A seated lunch in a boardroom can take platters that need a plate. A client-facing launch wants fewer things done properly rather than a long spread. A farewell wants a cake, because a farewell without a cake reads as an afterthought no matter what else is on the table.

Here is the one genuine limit on a last-minute party, and it is worth knowing before you promise anything. Food is next-day. Decorated cakes and cupcakes are not, because they need two to three business days: the baking, the crumb coat, the setting time and the piping all happen on different days, and there is no way to compress that without the decoration looking compressed. If the party is tomorrow and you have promised a cake with somebody's name piped across it, that promise is the thing to renegotiate, not the caterer. An undecorated cake, a scone and fruit platter or a box of cupcakes ordered off the shelf will be on the table tomorrow and nobody will feel short-changed.

Match the food to the hour as well as to the occasion. A room at three in the afternoon eats about half what the same room eats at midday, so an afternoon party wants a graze and a sweet rather than a meal, and ordering lunch quantities for a 3pm start is the most common way to end up with leftovers. A morning event is the opposite: people arrive genuinely hungry, and a morning tea for twenty will disappear faster than a lunch for twenty.

Decide the drinks at the same time, because they change how much food you need. A room with drinks in it eats more, later, and keeps eating. A room with tea, coffee and water eats once and stops.

3. Date and time of the event

Secure a clear schedule before anything else is promised. Is it a morning tea, a lunch, an afternoon graze or an evening thing? Once the date and the hour are fixed the invitations can go out, and once the invitations have gone out you have a count, which is the number the caterer needs. Trying to run those three in parallel is what produces an order placed twice and changed three times.

The deadline that matters is 4pm the day before. An order in before then is delivered the next day, anywhere across more than fifty Brisbane suburbs, at the same rate on a Saturday as on a weekday, and with no surcharge for being last minute. That means a party at three tomorrow afternoon is comfortably in range, and so is a nine-o'clock breakfast meeting. If your event starts earlier than a delivery run can reach you, pick-up is open from 7am at 159 Knapp St in Fortitude Valley, and somebody driving in can have the boxes on the table before the room fills.

Then set the delivery time, which is not the same as the start time. Cold food platters want to land about an hour before the event, and hot food fifteen minutes before. Those two numbers are the difference between food that looks like the photograph and food that has been sitting. An hour gives you time to unwrap, lay out and fix the table without an audience. Fifteen minutes on hot food is not fussiness: a hot item that waits half an hour steams itself soft inside its own box, and it will not come back.

Look at the hour you have chosen from the room's point of view, not the calendar's. Food landing in the middle of a meeting that is running late is food nobody unpacks. Nominate someone who will definitely be at their desk at that time, not the person running the meeting. And book the room for thirty minutes before the invitation says, because a party that starts at noon in a room booked from noon starts at ten past twelve with everybody watching you cut sticky tape.

One more scheduling habit worth copying from caterers: work backwards. Write down the hour the first person eats, subtract the set-up, subtract the delivery window, and that is your real deadline. It is almost always earlier than the one in your head.

4. Ordering in catering service

For a last-minute office party the instinct is that no good caterer will have room. Usually they will, as long as you are ordering from a kitchen that makes this food every day rather than one taking on something unusual for you. Look for a track record with corporate orders specifically, because feeding an office is a different discipline from feeding a wedding: it is smaller, earlier, more repetitive and far less forgiving about the delivery time.

If it is your first order, call and say what the event is, how many people, and what time they eat. A kitchen that does this daily will steer you to the right quantities faster than a menu will, and will tell you which items travel and which do not. Then browse the full catering range with those numbers in hand. In practice a good office order is built from these six decisions:

·        For a starter, a light finger food catering selection. Order it to be eaten in the first hour rather than to sit; anything crumbed or fried is excellent for about fifteen minutes and ordinary after thirty, so it should arrive with the people, not before them.
·        What you will serve as the main, such as pies, rice paper rolls and quiches. Quiche is the quiet winner here because it is as good at room temperature as it is warm. Rice paper rolls go down in a single layer and are never stacked, because the wrappers stick to each other within minutes and come apart when you separate them.
·        Food platters, such as sandwich platters. These are the backbone of an office order because they need no plate, no cutlery and no decision from anybody. Keep them covered until people are actually in the room; twenty minutes of open air is visible on a cut sandwich as a dry, pale edge.
·        A menu for the special dietary options, ordered as whole items rather than as an afterthought plate.
·        Morning or afternoon tea and sweet treats such as cakes and desserts. Cream-based sweets are the ones with a clock on them in a warm room, so they come out last and go back in the fridge first.
·        Beverages such as spring water, juice, iced tea and soft drinks. A meeting room with thirty people in it warms up fast, and people drink more than anybody plans for.

Then write the delivery brief, which is the part of the order most likely to be left blank and most likely to cost you the timing. Put the street address with the level and the suite, the name of the person who will physically take the boxes, and that person's mobile rather than the reception landline. Say whether there is a dock, whether the lift needs a pass, and whether reception closes early. Deliveries from $19 on orders over $150 get the food to the door; what gets it to the right floor is that paragraph.

Two habits that save last-minute orders. Order slightly over on the safe items and exactly on the fragile ones, because sandwiches and fruit keep and hot food does not. And place the order once, fully, rather than in three messages across an afternoon, since every amendment is a chance for a line to be read twice or not at all.

5. Finalize and set up

A few days out, send a short reminder with the time, the room and one line about the food, because a party people have forgotten about is the main reason food goes uneaten. Reconfirm the count at the same time. If it has moved by more than a few people, change the order before the 4pm cut-off rather than hoping the numbers even out.

Check that everything else is where it should be: the music, the games, the prizes, the decorations and whatever entertainment has been promised. On the day you will be busy with small things, which is exactly when the large things get forgotten, so walk the room once the morning before with the list in your hand.

Budget twenty minutes for set-up and put somebody's name against it. Catering arrives boxed, because that is how it survives the drive, and a spread that looks effortless has been unwrapped, laid out and tidied by someone. Nobody plans for that twenty minutes and every office discovers it at the same moment.

Measure the table before the food arrives rather than after. A thirty-seven piece grazing box wants about a metre of clear surface, and a boardroom table with two laptops, a monitor arm and a phone on it does not have a metre. Clearing the table is a five-minute job the day before and a small crisis in front of guests.

Lay it out in the order people will walk past it: savoury first, sweet at the far end, drinks off the food table entirely so the queue does not stall in the middle. Leave lids and covers on until people are actually in the room. It feels over-cautious and it is the single thing that makes food look freshly made an hour later.

Two unglamorous items nobody puts on a checklist. Bins: a party for thirty produces more rubbish than an office kitchen bin holds, so have a second bag standing by or the table starts collecting plates. And water: put it where people can reach it without crossing the room, and there will be less warm juice left at the end.

Delegate on the day. Give one person the door, one person the table and one person the bins, and say it out loud rather than assuming. Anything you keep for yourself, you will be doing while somebody senior is asking you a question.

Afterwards, deal with the leftovers immediately rather than at five o'clock. Cold platters go into the fridge and are genuinely good the next morning; hot food that has been out for the length of a party does not get a second life, and it is kinder to say so than to leave it on the bench. A quick note to yourself while it is fresh, on what ran out and what came back untouched, makes the next order twenty minutes shorter.

Planning for a last-minute office party can be stressful, but very little of it is genuinely urgent once it is written down, and a good challenge with a short deadline tends to bring out the organiser in people. If you need a Brisbane caterer at short notice, we are Mr T's Bakery, everything goes out of our own kitchen, and we would rather you rang and asked than guessed. Just give us a call.

Some Catering Food Ideas

These are the items that do the most work at an office party, chosen for how they behave once they have been put down on a table and left there. Everything here is made by hand in the Fortitude Valley kitchen, travels without staff, and needs nothing from your office except a clear table.

Breakfast Wraps Collection - 15 wraps/box

Fifteen wraps to a box, halved, which feeds a morning meeting of about ten to twelve people once a couple of the bigger eaters take two. A breakfast wrap is the most forgiving thing on an early menu because it is wrapped: the filling is held inside its own tortilla, so it does not dry out on the table the way an open roll does.

Stand the halves on end rather than laying them flat. A wrap left lying on its side for an hour flattens under its own weight and the filling migrates to the low end, so the last person to reach the box gets the empty half. Stood up, the box looks full until it is genuinely empty, which is the difference between fifteen wraps and fifteen wraps that got eaten.

Fresh Baked Butter Milk Scones Box - 24 Scones/Box (VEG)

Twenty-four scones is a morning tea for twenty with a few spare, and it is the cheapest way to make a room feel catered for rather than fed. Scones are best inside a few hours of coming out of the oven, which is the whole argument for ordering them for the morning rather than buying them the night before.

Send the jam and the cream beside the scones, never on them. A pre-loaded scone is soft within about ten minutes because the cream wets the crumb from the inside, and it cannot be undone. Let people build their own at the table and the last scone in the box is as good as the first. Do not put them in the fridge either; baked goods stale fastest at fridge temperature, which is the opposite of what everybody assumes.

Tea Time Scones and Fruit Platter (VEG)

Scones with a fruit platter beside them is the safest single order for a mixed room, because between the two there is something for the person who wants a treat and something for the person who does not. It also photographs well, which matters more than it should when the party is being posted internally.

Cut fruit has about four hours before it starts to look tired, well before it is any problem to eat. Melon is the one to watch: it keeps weeping, and the water runs to the low corner of the tray and sits under everything else. Set the platter on a level surface, and if the board has been out a while, tip the corner and blot it rather than rearranging the fruit.

Breakfast Grazing Collection - 37 Pieces/box

Thirty-seven pieces across pastries, fruit and yoghurt covers a room of fifteen to twenty for a proper breakfast, and it solves the problem of a group arriving at different times, because a graze does not need everybody present at once to work.

Pastry is the item on this list with the shortest window in Brisbane. A croissant is at its best in the first hour and goes soft after that, and humidity does it faster than heat does, so a graze box put out at eight and eaten at nine is right and one put out at eight and eaten at eleven is not. It also needs about a metre of table, so measure before it lands rather than after.

Medium Banh Mi Platter - 12 Pairs/Platter

Twelve pairs is lunch for about twelve people, or a substantial graze for eighteen if there is anything else on the table. A banh mi platter is the order to place when the room includes people who are quietly bored of sandwiches, and it is the one that gets remembered.

Eat it early. A crisp roll has roughly forty minutes from the moment it is filled before the pickled carrot starts to wet the crumb from the inside, and once the bread has gone soft the whole point of the roll has gone with it. That makes banh mi a brilliant twelve-o'clock order and a poor one for food that has to sit until two.

Large Banh Mi Platter - 18 Pairs/Platter

Eighteen pairs takes the same idea up to a lunch for around eighteen, or a bigger room where it sits alongside a sandwich platter. Ordering one large rather than two mediums is the better call when the whole room eats at once, because it lands as a single tray and is laid out in one movement.

Split it if the room does not eat at once. Put half out and keep half boxed for the second wave, and the people who arrive at half past twelve get the same roll as the people who arrived at noon. A tray that has been picked over for an hour is the most common reason a good platter gets a lukewarm reception.

Triangle Traditional Sandwiches - By Serves

Sold by serves, so this is the item you scale precisely against the count rather than guessing at platter sizes. One and a half rounds a head for a working lunch, one round a head where there is other food on the table. Traditional triangles are the least demanding thing you can put in front of a mixed room: no plate, no cutlery, no explanation, and everybody knows what they are taking.

The enemy is air, not time. A cut sandwich left uncovered dries at the cut edge within about twenty minutes, and on white bread you can see it from across the room. Keep the cover on until people are in the room, and if the platter has to wait, wait it in the coolest spot in the office rather than under the window that gets the afternoon sun.

Homemade Sourdough Sandwiches - By Serves

Also by serves, and the order to place when there are clients or partners in the room. Sourdough is a firmer crumb than sandwich white, which is exactly why it holds up better across a long lunch: it takes a wetter filling without going through, and it still eats well an hour after the platter went down.

It is also the more substantial option, so count it slightly lower than white bread rounds. A sourdough round fills people up faster, and the common mistake is to order the same number of serves and then find a quarter of the platter is still there at two o'clock. If in doubt, order sourdough for the room and traditional triangles for the volume, and put them out side by side.