If Cinco de Mayo is on your calendar this year, now's a good time to plan for it. Here are three decisions that can make your Cinco de Mayo lunch memorable.
The biggest miss on a holiday-adjacent corporate lunch is the timing of the order itself. Most office managers wait until the week before, and by then the menu options you actually want are already committed to other offices.
For a May 5 lunch, the order should go in by the third week of April — two weeks out, not one. That gives you room to confirm headcount, flag dietary notes, and adjust if someone invites a second team. It also gives the caterer room to do the menu properly.
A taco bar looks good on paper. In practice, it's a bottleneck. Twenty people line up, the first five build elaborate plates, the rest rush through, and the tortillas are lukewarm by the time the last person is served.
What works for a Midtown office lunch is a pre-composed format: platters that are ready to eat when they arrive, grouped by type, with minimal assembly on site. Guests grab what they want from a central setup and sit down. The line stays short, the food stays hot, and people actually sit down and eat.
A good Cinco de Mayo menu is built around food that holds well for the length of a normal office lunch and doesn't need a chef on-site to finish. That's the real constraint corporate catering works within, and menus designed for it taste better than ones that aren't.
"Something Mexican for 20 people" is how office lunches become forgettable. The kitchen defaults to the most broadly appealing options, and the menu ends up looking like every other Cinco de Mayo lunch your team has had.
The fix is specificity. Tell the caterer what your team actually likes. If three people don't eat meat, say so early — it shapes the whole menu, not just one tray. A good corporate caterer will use that information to make choices you wouldn't have thought to ask for: a mole option instead of another chicken dish, rajas poblanas alongside the rice and beans, a salsa verde that actually has heat in it.
Drinks that are not Coca-Cola. Catered office lunches default to sodas and bottled water. For a holiday lunch, ask about non-alcoholic aguas frescas. Horchata and jamaica travel well, hold for the length of lunch, and tell your team that someone planned the day instead of just the headcount.
Dessert that's not an afterthought. Churros in a warmer, tres leches cut into individual portions, or mini flan. Any of these takes the lunch from "catered" to "planned." The cost difference is small. The perception difference is large.
The setup matters more than the menu.
A memorable Cinco de Mayo lunch isn't the one with the most ambitious food. It's the one where the food is ready when people walk into the conference room, where there are enough plates and napkins so nobody has to ask, and where the lunch starts on time because the caterer showed up fifteen minutes before the meeting broke, not fifteen minutes after.
That's the invisible part of corporate catering. You don't notice it when it's right. You notice when it isn't.
Metro's Cinco de Mayo menu launches April 30. You can see it at metrocateringnyc.com/menu, and the ordering team can walk you through options for headcount, setup, and dietary notes.
For a larger event — a client lunch, an all-hands, anything that runs past the normal hour — our corporate events team can scope it with you directly.
Cinco de Mayo is two weeks out. The lunch that gets remembered is the one that got ordered this week.
Metro Catering has been NYC’s trusted corporate catering provider since 1981, offering fresh, high-quality meals for office lunches, corporate events, and workplace dining—delivered on time, every time.
