Per-person rates by meal, what drop-off saves against staffed service, how staffing is charged, and multi-day crew runs — from a working Santa Barbara caterer. No “contact us for pricing.”
See your itemized estimate in about two minutes — meals and staffing priced by headcount, with the service fee itemized for your company event. No waiting for a callback.
Both ends are real jobs we do. $17 is a boxed-lunch drop-off — we deliver and set up, your team serves. $57 is a fully staffed day with breakfast, lunch and dinner and our people on site throughout. Everything in between is a question of how many meals run and how much of the job you want us to handle. All-in means food, staff, the service fee, sales tax and card processing — there is nothing added after this.
Free · about 2 minutes · no phone call required
You pay for the meals that actually run. A team eating one lunch is charged for one lunch; a crew on site from breakfast through dinner is charged for three.
| Breakfast | $13 per person |
| Lunch | $15 per person |
| Dinner | $16 per person |
| All three, one day | $44 per person |
Seasonal, scratch-made menus by chef-owner Golzar Meamar, designed around your team and any dietary needs — vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and allergies handled cleanly rather than as an afterthought. All-day snacks and coffee can be added and are itemized separately on your estimate. See a sample menu →
This is the single biggest lever on your number. It’s the first thing our estimate asks.
We deliver, you set out and serve. No staff on site. You pay for the food, the 5% service fee and sales tax — no staffing line at all, and no Saturday event minimum on any day of the week. A 100-person lunch drop-off is about $1,744, roughly $17 a head.
We bring the team, serve, and clean up. The same 100-person lunch with our team on site is about $1,930 — the difference is the staffing hours below. This is the option for receptions, client dinners and anything you’d rather not be managing yourself.
You have food handled — we bring people, rentals and bar. No food line at all — you’re billed for the hours worked at $40 per hour plus whatever rentals and bar you need. We’ve run exactly this for a company event where catering was already handled elsewhere.
And a company lunch doesn’t have to arrive in a box. Full-service family-style dining — generous shared platters set down for people to pass — is the heart of this business. It’s how we serve weddings across California, most of what we do, on the most important day of someone’s life. A boxed drop-off is the light end of our range, not the middle of it. So if your group would rather eat at a table than out of a box, ask for a served family-style lunch or a staffed buffet: the same kitchen and the same team that run those weddings, quoted for your group.
Our team is billed at $40 per hour for culinary and service, covering setup, service and breakdown at each meal. We plan about one team member per 50 people (rounded up) and 2 hours per meal service.
So a 100-person day with all three meals is 2 team members × 6 hours × $40 = $480 for the day. The same group fed only lunch is $160. That’s the whole model: meals drive the hours, not the length of your day. A ten-hour offsite with one lunch service doesn’t get billed ten hours of labour, which is exactly how event-style day-rate pricing tends to go wrong on corporate work.
One weekday, itemized the way your actual estimate would be.
| Food — breakfast, lunch & dinner, $44 per person | $4,400 |
| Service staff — 2 × 6 hrs at $40/hr | $480 |
| Service fee (5%) | $244 |
| Sales tax (7.75%) | $378 |
| Card processing (3.5%) | $171 |
| All-in total | $5,673 |
| ≈ $57 per person · 25% deposit to reserve the date ≈ $1,418 |
The same 100 people as a lunch drop-off is about $1,744 (≈$17 a head); as a staffed lunch, about $1,930 (≈$19 a head). Paying by check or bank transfer instead of card saves the processing fee — about $171 on the full-day example.
A small unit is where the daily minimum decides the number, so if you’re feeding a crew rather than a conference this is the example to read.
| Food — lunch, $15 per person | $405 |
| Daily minimum — top-up to $950 | $545 |
| Service fee (5%) | $48 |
| Sales tax (7.75%) | $74 |
| Card processing (3.5%) | $33 |
| All-in total | $1,104 |
| ≈ $41 per person · 25% deposit to reserve the date ≈ $276 |
At this size the food alone — $405 — doesn’t reach our $950 daily minimum, so the day prices at the minimum instead: the van, the kitchen morning and the delivery cost the same whatever the headcount. That’s why a small crew lands nearer $41 a head than the $17at the bottom of our published range — that low end is a big group’s number, and we’d rather you saw both. The minimum is per day, so on a multi-day run each day is priced this way.
Production shoots, conferences, retreats and multi-day offsites — where the same crew eats on site day after day.
| Food — 5 days × 100 people × $44 per person | $22,000 |
| Service staff — 6 hrs a day at $40/hr | $2,400 |
| Service fee (5%) | $1,220 |
| Sales tax (7.75%) | $1,891 |
| Card processing (3.5%) | $854 |
| All-in total | $28,365 |
| 500 person-days · 1,500 meals served · ≈ $57 per person, per day |
Plates, flatware, glassware, linens and — where a venue has no service kitchen — the kitchen equipment itself come from a rental house rather than from us, so they sit outside every number above. How much you need is decided by how the food is served: boxed lunches dropped off often need none of it, while a served meal on real tableware needs a full tabletop order.
Those are typical from our 2024–2026 orders— real orders we’ve placed and paid, not a quote for yours. What moves you down the list is scope rather than the venue’s name: a bar adds glassware, and a full-service event at a venue with no service kitchen adds the kitchen itself.
You don’t need to arrange a kitchen for a crew — for crew feeding we don’t build one at all. Everything is prepared in our own commercial kitchen and arrives hot in insulated transport; on site we need only a modest staging footprint — a covered area, a few tables, power for hot boxes and coffee, and access to water. That is dramatically less expensive than a kitchen build-out, and it’s how we run most multi-day productions.
The full build is a different job. For full-service events — a served family-style dinner, a wedding-calibre service at a venue with no service kitchen — we bring a complete kitchen and build it on site: ovens, a range, racks and sheet pans. That equipment rides the rental order at the full-service end of the ladder above, and it is the easiest line to miss in a first budget.
We’re glad to place and manage the rental order for you, or you or your own coordinator can. We start with a preliminary rental pull, so you’re budgeting the whole event from the beginning.
Keeping single-use plastic out of an event is part of how this kitchen runs, not something you have to ask us for. Where a meal has to travel — boxed lunches, drop-off service — the packaging and service materials we reach for first are compostable, and drinks come in cans or bulk dispensers rather than individual bottles.
And the more of the service we handle, the less packaging there is to begin with. A family-style lunch arrives on real platters and is eaten off real tableware, so at the end of it there is very little to throw away — one more reason a crew on site all week is worth serving properly.
Between $17 and $57 per person, per day, all-in with us — that's food, any staff on site, the service fee, sales tax and card processing. The low end is a boxed-lunch drop-off; the high end is a fully staffed day with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Per meal, breakfast is $13, lunch $15 and dinner $16 per person, so a full three-meal day is $44 per person in food.
Two, and they don't stack. Any day we cater for a company starts at $950 before fees — a delivery, a kitchen morning and a van cost the same whether they carry 20 lunches or 90 — and everything billable that day counts toward it, so it's a floor rather than a fee. Separately, Saturday events carry a $5,000 event minimum; Monday through Friday and Sunday they don't, which is what makes weekday corporate work cost-effective with us. Where both would apply we charge the higher one, never both.
A drop-off is the food, the 5% service fee and sales tax — we deliver and set up, and your team serves. Adding our staff to the same 100-person lunch takes it from about $1,744 to about $1,930, because staffing is billed by the hour on top. Drop-off is genuinely the cheaper option, and for an office lunch it's usually the right one.
By the hour, at $40 per hour, covering setup, service and breakdown at each meal. We plan roughly one team member per 50 people (rounded up) and 2 hours per meal service — so a 100-person day with three meals is 2 team members for 6 hours, $480 for the day. Meal services drive the hours, not the length of your day — a crew fed twice costs less to staff than a crew fed three times.
Yes, and it's billed as one job rather than as a stack of separate events: the whole run goes on a single invoice with a single deposit, however many days it covers. Headcount can change part-way through — you tell us the stretches ("60 for the first five days, then 105") and each day prices at its own count. A 5-day run for 100 people with three meals a day works out to about $28,365, roughly $57 per person per day.
A 5% service fee and local sales tax — the tax rate depends on where you are (about 7.75% in the Santa Ynez Valley). Card payments carry a 3.5% processing fee; paying by check or bank transfer avoids it entirely. Every figure on this page includes all three, so nothing appears later that isn't here.
A 25% deposit reserves the date, and the balance is due 30 days before. Events booked inside 30 days are simply paid in full up front. You get one itemized invoice — the line items are the same ones on your estimate, which is what accounting departments tend to ask us for.
More questions? The full FAQ covers dietary needs, tastings and logistics. See what we do for companies on corporate events, browse the sample menu, or read about holiday parties. Planning a wedding instead? What wedding catering costs →
The instant estimate runs the exact pricing engine behind our real client proposals — your dates, your headcount, your meals. Multi-day runs included.
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