Long Table Catering

Catering · Serving Sonoma, California

Restaurant food, at your long table.

Weddings, corporate lunches and family-style dinners for people who have sat through one too many plates of bad catered chicken.

Request a quote See the menu & prices

Mon–Fri 9am–5pmTastings $75, credited toward your booking

An outdoor table laid with grazing boards, figs and grapes, linen napkins and glasses down its length in soft daylight
Weddings from $95per person
Corporate lunches from $28per person
Family-style dinners from $60per person
Tastings $75credited toward your booking

Why most catered food isn’t good

It is a timing problem, not a talent problem.

Most catered food is cooked early, held warm for two hours and served tired. The banquet-hall taste people complain about is not a lack of skill — it is a lack of timing.

So we solve for timing. We cook on site and bring our own fire. Menus are built so the components that suffer from sitting are the ones finished last. Before service we walk the room to work out where the kitchen will sit and how far the food has to travel to the furthest table.

It is not glamorous. It is a professional kitchen’s habits, moved outdoors and applied to one dinner instead of three hundred.

How we work, start to finish

A cook in whites bent over the counter, finishing a plate of soup by hand

What the couple said after

“Guests are still texting me about the short rib. At a wedding. That never happens.”

Whitney & Cal

Short rib is not a hard dish. It is a dish that is easy to ruin by cooking it early and holding it warm, which is what usually happens to it at a wedding. How we avoid that

What we cook

Five ways we feed a room.

Menus are built around whatever is actually in season, so the list below is the shape of the thing, not the final dishes.

Weddings

from $95per person

Plated, or passed and family-style, cooked on site. Closer to a restaurant dinner than a banquet-hall plate — which is the whole reason we do this.

Corporate lunches

from $28per person

Lunch for the office or the offsite, off the same seasonal menus, built for a room that has to get back to work afterwards.

Family-style dinners

from $60per person

Platters set down the middle of the table and passed hand to hand — for the kind of dinner where people should be reaching across each other.

Bar service

By quote

Priced to your event rather than per head. Send the headcount and how long the bar needs to be open and we will put a number to it.

Tastings

$75credited toward your booking

Eat the menu before you sign for it. The $75 comes off your invoice when you book, so if you hire us it costs you nothing.

Every per-person price is a starting point — headcount, service and what is at the market that week move it. The full menu page, with the notes.

Seen from above: a table spread with bread, boards and small dishes, hands reaching in

From date to dinner

Three steps, start to finish.

You can stop after any of them.

  1. Send the date and the headcount

    And roughly what you had in mind. A menu and a price come back in writing — the dishes themselves get written closer to your date, around what the market is doing that week.

  2. Taste it before you sign

    Sit down and eat the menu before you commit to it. The tasting is $75, credited toward your booking.

  3. We cook, you sit

    On the day of the event, the kitchen arrives, sets up out of sight and cooks where you eat. If the bar is running, it is stocked and staffed alongside, priced to your evening.

Our work

The food as it actually goes out.

A plate of canapés on a wooden bench beside a window looking onto the garden
Passed bitesPlated in the light of the kitchen window, before they go out to the room.
Hands working a hand chopper through herbs over a bowl on a wooden board
Prep, the morning ofHerbs done by hand in the commissary kitchen before anything leaves it.
Seen from above: a cheese board, a bowl of salad, olives and sliced bread set out together
Down the middleBoards and bowls set out for people to reach across, which is how we like to feed a room.

Six pictures from our own events and our own kitchen — see all of them.

Who cooks it

Nine years on the line, then the produce won.

I cooked on the line in San Francisco for nine years, moved up here for the produce, and started catering out of a commissary kitchen in 2015. The first two years were one kitchen, one van and a lot of Saturdays.

It is a full crew now, most of whom came out of restaurants too, and the standard is the one I was taught: nothing leaves unless somebody senior has looked at it.

The longer version

Cooks working down a long pass, plating rows of identical dishes for service

Request a quote

Tell us about your event.

Send the date, the headcount and roughly what you had in mind. We will come back with a menu and a price — and if a tasting makes sense, we will set one up.

  • A menu and a price come back in writing.
  • Tastings are $75, credited toward your booking.
  • We answer Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.
HoursMon–Fri 9am–5pm
Where we workServing Sonoma, California

Request a quote

Plated or family style, indoors or out, and anything you already know you want on the table.

This opens your email app with the details filled in. Rather talk? Call (707) 555-0554.