NYC Business Dinner For 20

[Amy Viny]

Im planning a dinner for 20 in NYC in April for a national professional organization and I need a few suggestions. Location wise we would like to be in the 50's around 7th Ave. Price point needs to be about $100.00 per person plus wine. Ideally we would like to be able to order off a menu and sit in the main dining to get the real flavor of the restaurant. We are thinking about places like Insieme, perhaps Avoce but haven't done much research yet. Typically this group has suffered through the typical convention rubber chicken type dinners. We would like to try to do something different and better this time. Any ideas?

[Fat Guy]

Most good restaurants won't do normal dining-room menu service for groups larger than eight. A few will go up to ten or twelve. But I can't think of a good restaurant that will do 20. There are four main reasons for this: first, most kitchens can't handle that volume of orders coming in all at once, so they need to know in advance what the group will have or at least narrow it to a couple of choices so they can prep (and some restaurants cook off a separate line for banquets); second, for inventory purposes the kitchen needs to limit the options for a group that large; third, service-wise you need a dedicated team to handle that table; and fourth, a group that large disturbs the other customers. You'll probably need to do a private room for that number.

In terms of the price point, $100 is slightly lower than a place like Insieme will do for private dining. You might be able to do $110 per person for food there -- I believe that's the minimum, and it gets higher if you do hors d'oeuvres or graduate up to more courses and choices. (Basic information is on the restaurant's website but you'll have to call the private dining manager for full information.) Same with the Modern and a few other Midtown places I can think of: $100 is going to define the lower limit, and I don't recommend doing the minimum at any restaurant. You're better off going down a level of restaurant and going all out. For example if you went to Becco and said you had $100 per person to spend, plus a separate wine budget, they'd give you the absolute royal VIP soigne treatment. I'm not even sure you could spend $100 per person on food there no matter how hard you tried.

(A Voce is not geographically near where you're talking about.)

The other option, and I've seen plenty of groups do this, is to break up the group into teams and book normally at restaurants. For example you could have five groups of four and send one (or two) to Insieme, one (or two) to the Modern, etc. But if you all want to dine together, same place same time, private dining is the thing.

[Nathan]

yup