Ideas, not a menu.
Everything below is something Michelle has actually built for someone. None of it is a package you order. It’s here so you have words for the thing you’re picturing when the two of you sit down.
Most people arrive knowing the date, the headcount and roughly the feeling they want, and not much else. That’s a fine place to start. Pick a direction here, tell us what drew you to it, and we’ll build from there. Including straight past it, if that’s where the conversation goes.
What a table actually is
Not a platter set down on a cloth. A table is built in place, in layers. Risers under the boards, greenery along the front edge, height in the middle so your eye has somewhere to go. It takes hours and it gets photographed before anyone eats.
That’s the version people mean when they say grazing table. Everything below is a different answer to the same question: what do you want the room to do when people walk in?
Five directions
Each of these has been built at every size from a dinner party to a reception. The lists are examples, not the whole of what’s possible. They’re here to give you something to react to.
-
The Signature Graze
The grazing table itself, at event scale. Artisan cheeses and cured meats, fruit and crudités, and house-made spreads: whipped ricotta, whipped feta, olive tapenade, roasted garlic hummus, fig preserves, hot honey. Breads and crackers to carry them. Marcona almonds, candied pecans, honeycomb, cornichons, Castelvetrano olives, marinated mushrooms, stuffed peppadews. Dessert built into the same run: macarons, mini cheesecakes, cannoli bites, chocolate-dipped strawberries.
-
The Coastal Boil
A low-country boil, either way you want it. Dumped down the middle of butcher paper the way it’s meant to be eaten, or built up as a display with seafood towers, hanging citrus and cast-iron butter warmers. Shrimp, crab, crawfish, mussels, clams, andouille and smoked sausage, potatoes and sweet corn. A butter flight: roasted garlic, Cajun, lemon dill, brown butter and herb, honey hot. Remoulade and chipotle aioli alongside. Southern sides and key lime pie shooters after.
-
La Tavola Italiana
A long Italian table. Chicken parmesan, piccata, eggplant parmesan, braised short rib ragu, sausage with peppers. A pasta station where guests build their own from fresh pastas and house-made sauces, and a bruschetta bar: tomato basil, whipped ricotta, mushroom, roasted garlic, burrata with fig jam. Focaccia, garlic knots and olive bread with olive oils and aged balsamic. Tiramisu, panna cotta shooters, lemon olive oil cake, biscotti.
-
The New Mexico Table
What people here actually grew up eating, plated like it matters. Red and green chile enchiladas, stacked or rolled, carne adovada, carnitas, chicken mole, green chile meatballs, brisket with green chile gravy. Posole, calabacitas, charro beans, elote salad, green chile mac and cheese. Sopapillas and fry bread with honey and cinnamon butter, blue corn muffins, green chile cornbread. Biscochitos, tres leches shooters, flan, churro bites.
-
The Smokehouse
Smoked meats and the things that belong beside them. Brisket, ribs and sliders, a mac and cheese bar, a cornbread station with a compound butter bar, an artisan pickle market, gourmet vegetables and a dessert run of peach cobbler and banana pudding. Add-on stations if you want them: prime rib carving, smoked queso, elote cups, a s’mores firepit.
The food is the part people stand around.
Everything above is a starting point, not a set of options. Plenty of events land between two of them, and some land nowhere near any of it. A dish someone’s grandmother made. A format nobody in town has tried. A room that needs something this page doesn’t cover. Bring that. It’s the more interesting conversation.
Michelle isn’t only the person cooking. She designs what the table does: how it’s laid, what people reach for first, where they end up standing, what they photograph before they eat. The food is the most social part of an event, and she treats it as the thing the room gets built around.
Your budget is part of that design, not a gate in front of it. Tell her what you’re working with and she builds toward the thing you actually pictured, not a smaller version of someone else’s. That’s the whole reason there’s a conversation here instead of a price list.
If you do want our opinion, these are the two we’d steer you toward:
The living table
Instead of food arranged on a surface, an edible garden. Herbs still in their pots, citrus branches, edible flowers, real height off wooden risers and stone. Guests walk through it. It photographs like nothing else in this city.
A taste of New Mexico
A tasting station inside the larger spread: stuffed sopaipillas, roasted Hatch chile, blue corn crackers with pinto bean hummus, local honey, New Mexico cheeses, biscochitos, red and green side by side. For out-of-town guests it’s the whole trip in one pass.
The small stuff is the work
Anyone can put out a cheese board. The difference is in the hour that goes into arrangement. Skewers set in a wheel. A bowl dropped into the middle so the shape reads from across the room. Balsamic run over the top last, so it still looks deliberate two hours in.
Bring us a photo of something you liked. That’s often the fastest way to tell us what you actually want.
Where this tends to land
Most of what we build comes in somewhere between roughly $30 and $100 a guest. That bracket is deliberately wide, because a drop-off grazing board for twenty and a full-service reception for three hundred are not the same job. Format, season, guest count, how much of the room we’re dressing, and whether we’re staffing it all move the number.
That range is only there so you know whether we’re in your world before you spend time on an inquiry. It is not a quote and there is no price list behind it. Michelle builds your actual number with you, against your actual event, and that is the only figure that means anything.