About Sagaponack Catering Co.

Sagaponack Catering Co. is a referral service for hosts on the South Fork of Long Island, Southampton to Montauk. We don't cook, staff a bar or hold a tent permit ourselves: when a host needs a caterer, we find the one who's actually free and right for the event, and put the two of you in touch. We're named for the hamlet, not for any kitchen in it.

The date is the whole problem

Ask a Hamptons caterer if they're open for a Saturday in August and the honest ones laugh. Summer Saturdays at the venues that host weddings book 18 to 24 months out, and caterers want nine to twelve months' notice even after the venue is locked — inside the 15-month average American engagement, because the Hamptons calendar runs on a shorter clock. A rehearsal dinner is worse: its date isn't the host's to pick, it's the Friday of somebody else's wedding weekend, also the hardest night of the year to staff. By the time most hosts start calling around, the good caterers are already booked.

What a caterer needs before they can say yes

A caterer can't say yes to a date until they know four things, and we get all four before anyone calls a host back: the date and headcount, even rough; the venue, and whether it has a working kitchen or everything arrives by truck; the service style — passed hors d'oeuvres, a buffet, stations or a plated dinner, because that one choice drives staff numbers more than anything else; and anything fixed, dietary requirements, whether there's a bar, a finish time the town or the venue sets. Get those four right and the caterer who calls can actually do the job.

How we check a kitchen

Before a caterer gets a host's number, we check that they cook from a kitchen permitted by the Suffolk County Department of Health Services and carry liability insurance. Then we check whether they've actually done an event this size: a company that runs a plated dinner for two hundred under sailcloth all summer isn't automatically right for twelve at the table in February. We ask for references from events like the one in front of us, and confirm they staff at the ratios the format needs, then the question a permit doesn't answer: what happens if it rains.

What it costs

Nothing, for hosts. Participating caterers pay us a referral fee for the introduction. You pay the caterer on their proposal, and we do not sell your details to anyone.

About the prices on this site

Hamptons catering is priced by proposal, and proposals are private, so the numbers here come from wherever they're actually published: a regional survey, a handful of named caterers' own posted terms, the county's tax bulletins, the towns' event-permit pages. A 2025 magazine survey isn't a sample of real contracts, and we treat it as the local order of magnitude, not gospel. Where a Hamptons figure doesn't exist, we print the national or New York City number instead and say so. Some things we don't print at all: an actual Hamptons corkage fee, a real tasting-fee dollar amount, what a day-of coordinator here charges — we found five conflicting answers for one figure and left it out.