Gurnam’s Catering

This has to be one of the best Indian caterers in the area from parties at home to major events and weddings. But be warned, if you are catering a wedding, a certain degree of trust is needed.
We hired Gurnam’s to cater our wedding last year and could not have been happier. The food is really homemade and excellent. People still talk about their Gobi Kaju and the Aloo Tikki chaat but everything they’ve made for us has been delicious. To top that off they are very reasonably priced. We had a bunch of tastings at various places and, to put this in perspective, Bombay club quoted us way more than double Gurnam’s price.
The waitstaff at the wedding was very professional and nice. I thought they did a wonderful job. But I should also mention that I was a very very relaxed bride. There were one or two minor very minor (in my mind) slips such as there was not enough time to fold napkins so we used paper napkins on the buffet and somehow we only had spoons to eat with (we often eat Indian food with spoons or hands so it was really not a big deal to me). To avoid this type of thing you could easily hire more waitstaff or even just get the food from Gurnam’s and hire someone else to take care of the serving/​setup. The most important thing was that the food was great .
Since then we’ve also had them cater a party at home for which we just drove up to Merrimack and picked up the food. It’s well worth the drive from Boston but you can get it delivered. Again, the prices are very reasonable and the food was so fresh and delicious. Of all the food, the only thing we didn’t love was the chicken tikka kababs. Gurnam’s seems to do much better with curries and veg dishes. For appetizers it is probably better to stick with something vegetarian. That said the lamb curry and chicken tikka masala at our wedding was fabulous.
Now to the trust part. So for the party it was no big deal, we called about a week in advance, placed the order and then picked it up. No problems. For the wedding, we went up, had a tasting but did not taste everything, nor did we choose what we tasted. Mr. Gurnam brought us a big selection of everything they happened to be cooking at that moment and it was all so good. We had also eaten their food before at a friend’s party so we knew the quality was very good. But to organize the whole wedding thing, the cutlery, glasses, silver ware, coffee, all that stuff that goes into a big dinner I probably had four phone conversations with Mr. Gurnam’s son Bikram. He is very nice but was hard to get hold of. He totally came through for the wedding but if you want to really manage things closely or are the nervous type, be warned. Also, when calling to place orders etc. if you can’t reach Bikram it helps if you speak some Hindi or Punjabi.