Cocktail reception
Passed and stationed hors d’oeuvres with full bar service. Guests stay on their feet and the room keeps moving.
Best for mingling
Milwaukee · Southeastern Wisconsin
Catering that’s cooked at your venue.
Other companies cook your dinner in a kitchen across town and drive it to you. That food can sit in a hot box for hours before anyone eats it. We bring the kitchen instead. Your mains and sides are cooked on site, in our mobile kitchen, by our own chefs.
From our kitchen
The plates.
Every photograph on this site is ours. Each plate links to its place on the menu.
- Cooked at your venueNot driven over in a hot box
- One team, not three vendorsOur chefs, our servers, our bartenders
- Milwaukee, since 2014Part of Cream City Concepts
Who we are
A Milwaukee caterer that brings the kitchen with it.
Cream City Catering is the catering arm of Cream City Concepts, the Milwaukee group behind Oak Barrel Public House, Who’s on Third and Who’s on Layton. We are based downtown at 1033 N Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and have catered across Milwaukee since 2014. We cook the mains and sides at your venue, in a mobile kitchen on our own truck, instead of reheating them after a drive across town.
Proteins come off heat minutes before they are served. Vegetables keep their texture. Sauces do not break waiting for the toasts to finish. And because our chefs are already standing in your venue, a timeline that slips by twenty minutes is a conversation rather than a crisis.
Service styles
Four ways to feed a room, and two lighter ones
Service style shapes the whole evening: the budget, the timeline, the room layout and how much your guests actually talk to each other. Four styles come with our crew on site. Two more are for events that do not need one.
Buffet
Chef-attended lines with mains and sides finished on site. The most range per dollar, and the easiest on picky eaters.
Best for range
Plated dinner
Coursed and individually plated, served to seated guests. The most formal, the most controlled, and the most staff.
Best for formality
Family style
Shared platters brought to each table. Guests pass the food, and the table starts talking before the first course is done.
Best for warmth| Style | How it works | Typical guest count | Relative cost | Time at table |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cocktail reception | Hors d’oeuvres passed by servers plus stationed displays; guests stand. | 25–300+ | Lowest per guest | Shortest: no seated meal |
| Buffet | Guests serve themselves from chef-attended lines; mains finished on site. | 40–400+ | Moderate | Medium: released by table |
| Plated dinner | Each course plated in the mobile kitchen and served to seated guests. | 40–250 | Highest: most service staff | Longest: coursed |
| Family style | Shared platters delivered to each table; guests pass and serve. | 30–200 | Moderate to high | Long, but social |
Guest-count ranges are typical, not limits. If your event sits outside them, ask, because the answer is usually yes.
Two lighter options, when you do not need a crew
Not every event wants servers in the room. These two are the same food, cooked in our kitchen rather than at your venue, without the front of house.
Drop-off catering
We cook it, we deliver it, we set it out in disposable or rented pans, and we leave. You handle the rest. Best for office lunches, meetings, showers and anything where the room runs itself.
Pick-up catering
Order ahead, collect it from us, take it where it is going. The least expensive way to feed a group from our kitchen, and the one with the most flexibility on timing.
Neither is cooked on site, which is the trade: they suit a lunch where a set delivery time matters more than food fired minutes before it is served. When the food is the point, the four styles above are the ones to look at.
What we cater
Every kind of room we have fed.
Weddings
- The dinner built out of the mobile kitchen and onto your guests’ tables
- You work with our planning team from the tasting through the last plate cleared
- Rehearsal dinner, rooms and shuttles from the same group
Corporate
- Board lunches, client events, holiday parties and galas
- Timed to your meeting, not to a drive across town.
- Invoicing your finance team will not fight you about
Social events
- Milestone birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, showers
- The backyard party that quietly turns into a hundred people
- Same kitchen, same crew, scaled to the room
Bar service
- Our bartenders come from our own restaurants
- Beer, wine and full cocktail packages, quoted with the menu
- One proposal, one invoice
The day
Then the doors open, and it is dinner.
The kitchen is parked, the room is set, the trays are moving. Until then, the wedding planning tools are free: a budget calculator, a staged timeline you can check off, and the seven questions worth asking every caterer, us included. No email address needed.
The team
The people you will be working with.
You are not handed off down a chain here. Alexa quotes your event and stays your contact through the day itself; Reid runs the floor.
Alexa Gruenwald
Director of Sales, Events and Marketing
414‑518‑6746
alexa@creamcityconcepts.com
Alexa went to school for radiology. It did not take, but it showed her what she wanted: work that put her in front of people who needed something from her. She has spent the years since finding out that hospitality is that work.
She has been in restaurants, events and hotels since 2012, and joined Cream City Catering in June 2026 as Director of Sales, Events and Marketing. In practice she answers your first message and she is still your contact on the day itself.
Most of the job in between is keeping sales, the kitchen and operations working from one version of your event rather than three, which is unglamorous and is the whole difference between a day that runs and a day that does not.
Ask her why she likes it and she talks about the days themselves. People hire us for the ones they will remember for the rest of their lives. That is a serious thing to be handed, and she does not treat it as anything less.
Reid Frederickson
Manager of Sales, Events and Marketing
Reid runs the events themselves, and is on the floor on the day.
Behind Alexa, he carries the operation from the signed proposal through to the end of the night, working between Alexa’s plan, the kitchen and the operations crew so that nothing that night is a surprise to any of them.
Most of what he does is quiet and decisive: getting the timeline agreed before anyone is under pressure, catching the detail that would otherwise surface at six o’clock that night, making sure the chef and the client mean the same thing by the same word.
He also shares the marketing brief with Alexa, which puts him in an unusual position. He writes what you read before you book, then stands in the room while it either holds up or does not. That tends to keep the writing honest.
Reid studied Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He works on the view that a good event starts as a real conversation.
Kayla Yang
Social Media & Content Creator
She photographs our events, and most of the food on this site is her work.
She is a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee studying marketing, and she came to Cream City from Sheboygan by way of several internships that taught her the difference between a picture of a plate and a picture that makes somebody hungry.
Most of what you have scrolled past on this page is hers: the trays going out at cocktail hour, the room before the doors open, the moment somebody takes the first thing off a passed plate.
She runs the social accounts as well. If you have seen us on Instagram, you have seen her work.
Request a quote
Tell us about your event.
Send the details and we will come back with a real proposal: menu, staffing and bar, not a brochure.
Prefer to talk it through? Call Alexa directly at 414-518-6746 or email alexa@creamcityconcepts.com. She runs sales and events, so you are talking to the person who will actually plan your day.
The five things that let us quote fastest: your date, guest count, venue, service style and whether you need bar service. The date, the guest count, the event style (that is the service style) and the address have their own boxes; bar service and anything else go in the message.
The style list is short for now. If yours is not on it, just say so in the message.
One building, one call
The wedding weekend, from one address.
Rehearsal dinner downstairs, rooms upstairs, the wedding cooked by the same kitchen, and Cream City Shuttle from the door. One group, and one person to call.
Rehearsal dinner
- Oak Barrel Public House, the whole second floor
- 30 to 180 guests, family style, the night before
Rooms upstairs
- Third Street Retreat: five apartments above Oak Barrel
- Two bedrooms and two baths each, sleeping 12 to 16
The wedding
- Cooked at your venue from the mobile kitchen
- Kitchen, staff and bar from one team
Shuttles
- $150 an hour, three-hour minimum, up to 25 a vehicle
- Hotel to venue, and home again
Questions
What things cost, and other questions
What does catering cost per person in Milwaukee?
We price per event, from your headcount, menu and service style, and Alexa sends a real number. For scale, The Knot puts Midwest wedding catering at $62 to $123 a head, and FlashCater puts Milwaukee full-service events at $24 to $55 a head and up.
Who is actually behind Cream City Catering?
Cream City Concepts, the Milwaukee restaurant group we are part of. Alexa Gruenwald quotes and plans your event, and Reid Frederickson runs the floor on the day.
Where is the food actually cooked?
At your event, from our own truck parked outside. Ask Alexa what that looks like at your venue.
Do you have your own venue, or do you come to ours?
Yours, almost always; off-site is the whole business. We bring the kitchen to your venue or your office anywhere in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington and Racine counties and cook the mains and sides there. Oak Barrel’s second floor is the one room we own; everything else we do is off-site.
What service styles do you offer?
Four full-service styles: cocktail reception with hors d’oeuvres, buffet with chef-attended lines, plated dinner by course, and family style with shared platters. We also do drop-off and pick-up catering for events that do not need a crew. The right choice depends on guest count, timeline and how much table service your venue can support.
What areas do you serve?
Southeastern Wisconsin: Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington and Racine counties. Farther out is quoted case by case; ask Alexa.
How do I get a catering quote?
Call Alexa at 414-518-6746, email alexa@creamcityconcepts.com, or use the quote request form on this page. Quotes are built from guest count, date, venue, service style and bar needs, so having those five details ready speeds things up considerably.
Do you provide bartenders and service staff?
Yes. We staff events with our own chefs, servers and bartenders, so one team is accountable for the kitchen, the floor and the bar.
Get in touch
Let’s dig in.
Alexa reads every inquiry herself and answers, usually the same day.
Main line
Office
1033 N Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Suite 600
Milwaukee, WI 53203