New Year's Eve Party Catering: Food That Survives Until Midnight

The problem with New Year’s Eve

Every other party has a meal in it. People arrive, they eat at roughly the time you said, and the food does its job in an hour.

New Year’s Eve does not work like that. Guests arrive across a three-hour spread, everyone is drinking from the moment they walk in, and the actual peak demand for food is somewhere around eleven: long after a normal buffet would have been put out, looked at, and gone dry.

Plan for the night you are actually having, not for a dinner party that happens to end at midnight.

Put it out twice

The single best thing you can do is split the food into two services.

Around eight. The substantial half. Sandwiches and savouries, the things that soak up an evening’s drinking. This is the service that matters most and it is the one people under-order.

Around eleven. The second half, something sweet, something fresh, and anything that would not have survived three hours on a table. Cake, fruit, crisps.

You do not need to order twice to do this. Order once and hold half of it back in a cool box.

What to order

• Buffet 5 at £7.70 a head is the sensible New Year’s Eve default: sandwiches plus sausage rolls, pork pies, quiche, samosas, falafel and bhaji. Savouries are what a drinking crowd actually wants.
• Buffet 9 at £11.00 is the full spread: everything above with hand cooked crisps, fresh fruit, homemade cakes and juice. This is the one that splits neatly into two services.
• Homemade cakes at £2.25 a head as a standalone if you want the late course and nothing else.
• Charcuterie, cheese or a ploughman’s platter at £16.50 each if you want something on the table all night rather than a formal service. Each serves a small group and they hold up for hours, which on this particular night is the whole point.

How much

More than you think, and here is why: on New Year’s Eve people eat over five hours rather than one. The usual rule of a plate each does not hold.

Order for your full headcount at the higher buffet rather than a bigger quantity of the cheaper one. On a night this long the variety matters more than the volume. A table of nothing but sandwiches at half eleven is a sad sight.

Every buffet is 30% vegetarian as standard, with vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free and halal portions prepared separately and labelled at no charge.

Drinks

If you are hosting at home you have this covered. If you have taken a room without a bar, cans of pop are £1.35, bottled water £1.35 and fruit juice £2.75 a litre, and on a night when a good share of the room is driving or not drinking, that is not an afterthought.

Booking it

New Year’s Eve is not a normal ordering week and the kitchen’s schedule over the holidays is not the usual one. Ring us in early December rather than in the last week, and we will tell you straight away what is possible for your date and what time it can arrive.

Ordinary lead time is 4pm the day before, delivery is free, and there is a £20 minimum on the order value. The holiday period is the one time of year when that ordinary lead time is worth ignoring in favour of booking early.

If it is a bigger night

For fifty or more, a hog roast works outdoors and carves as people come, from £7.25 a head, with a 50-guest minimum, about 3m by 5m of flat ground and a 25% deposit to hold the date. It needs considerably more notice than a buffet, and on New Year’s Eve it needs it earlier still.