Holiday party catering: book by Halloween, eat by Thanksgiving.

Every September we get the same wave of calls: company holiday parties, family Friendsgivings, retirement send-offs before year-end. By Halloween, half our holiday-party Saturdays are spoken for. By Thanksgiving, the kitchen is at capacity.

If you’re hosting in November or December and you’d like the food to actually be ours — not pulled from the back-up vendor list — book it by mid-October. That’s not a sales line. It’s how our calendar works.

Why the rush is real

A scratch kitchen has a ceiling. We can plate four hundred guests on a single Saturday or send food out to three off-site parties in an evening, but not both at the same hour. November and December are when both happen — the banquet hall fills up with corporate parties, and the off-site catering calendar fills up with the smaller home gatherings.

Chef Adolfo’s kitchen runs the same way it has since 1982: from scratch, with finite hands. When we tell a caller in early December that we’re at capacity, what we mean is that adding their order would compromise the food we already promised to other guests. We’d rather turn down work than do that.

The timeline that works

• By October 15: Reach out with a date and rough guest count. We’ll tell you in one call whether the date is open.
• By October 31: Lock in the menu. We’ll send a written quote with everything itemized.
• By November 15: Final headcount, dietary restrictions, delivery time. After this date, headcount changes can usually go up but rarely down.
• Event day: Food arrives hot, set up, ready to serve. We stay through service if it’s full-service catering.

Smaller events — a fifteen-person team dinner, a forty-person family Friendsgiving — can sometimes book inside this window. But the bigger the party, and the further from Ingleside, the earlier you’ll want to lock it in.

If the food has to be ours, the calendar has to be ours too.

What actually goes wrong when you wait

We don’t want to bait the urgency, but it’s worth being honest about what happens to clients who wait too long. We send them to a partner caterer we trust — same area, similar quality — but it’s not our food, and they know it. Or we fit them in with a stripped-down menu that drops the dishes that need the most kitchen time.

Neither is what you imagined when you decided to host. So we’d rather tell you in October.

If you’re planning something for this season, read our catering page or send us a date. One conversation and you’ll know where you stand on the calendar.