A Christmas table that the whole room can eat from
The Christmas meal is the one where a mixed family is most likely to end up with somebody eating around the menu. The turkey is usually fine; the stuffing, the gravy and half the sides traditionally are not.
Our Christmas table is built the other way round. Roast halal turkey with herb and onion stuffing, gravy, cranberry and roasted root vegetables — the full familiar shape — with nothing in it that quietly excludes anyone. No pork in the stuffing, no alcohol in the gravy, everything zabiha-sourced.
Alongside it sits the half of the table most Christmas menus do not have: jeweled rice, lamb and apricot stew, mezze, hummus and muhammara, fattoush. For a lot of families in Los Angeles that combination is not fusion, it is simply what Christmas looks like at their house.
- Roast halal turkey, herb and onion stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce
- Lamb and apricot stew, lamb chops, roast chicken
- Jeweled rice, garlic mashed potatoes, roasted root vegetables, squash and lentils
- Mezze, hummus and muhammara, fattoush and Greek salad
- Pecan pie and baklava on the same dessert table
The bird has a clock and the rest does not
A roast turkey is carved and served; it does not wait well, and a Christmas meal is the single most likely meal of the year to be delayed by people arriving late.
So the turkey is timed to a service moment you give us, and everything else on the table is chosen to hold around it. If the schedule is genuinely unpredictable, we will say so and weight the order toward the stews and the rice, which do not mind.
Book it in October
Christmas is the least flexible date in catering. There is one of it, everybody wants the same two days, and no amount of planning creates more kitchen.
We take Christmas bookings from early autumn and stop well before December. If this is the meal you want, the constraint is the calendar rather than the menu — secure the date and decide the food afterwards.
