Wedding Catering

You may already have in mind the type of food you would like at your Wedding. You may know whether you would like your Wedding Breakfast to be a BBQ, a sit-down 7-course cuisine extravaganza, or maybe you would prefer an intimate meal with only a selection of your guests and close family.

It's your wedding day, so you need to choose what you would prefer, however, bear in mind the food is one of the major parts of the day to the wedding guests, and is quite often one of the most talked about aspects of your wedding day.

Wedding Caterer or Family and Friends

Of course it's much easer to leave the wedding day catering plans to someone else, after all, the Bride and Groom have enough to think about as it is! The question is does your wedding reception venue have it's own in-house caterer, as most hotels will have, or have you decided that your wedding reception venue will be a grand marquee and therefore you need to arrange for a private wedding caterer company to come in and prepare the Wedding Menu of your dreams?

Asking your friends and family to help out with the wedding catering can be an excellent way to involve people who are keen to get involved (or interfere!). You and your partner need to set out clearly what standard of Wedding menu you are expecting and the budget they have to work to. These are the same steps as with a professional wedding caterer only without the help, assistance, and experience that a professional wedding caterer can offer you.

Wedding Menu

By now you should have a good idea of the number of people to cater for. These numbers will not be finalised yet, but you will probably have a good idea of how many guests you need to cater for for the full Wedding breakfast, and how many for the wedding reception. The next step is to think carefully whether you know of any guests who are vegetarian, vegan, or have allergies to gluten, nuts, dairy products etc. You need to ask people to let you know this on the Wedding Invitations, but if you know of any wedding guests, who have special dietary requirements at this stage then it can help with your choice of wedding menu.

Is there any particular menu that you and your partner want for your special day? Is there any particular food you want to avoid? Maybe every wedding you have ever been to has served chicken? Maybe you like the idea of dishing up duck to your honoured wedding guests, but are unsure of how this will go down with some of the fussier of the guests. This is a good time to speak to the members of the wedding party, particularly the mother of the bride, mother of the groom, father of the bride, and father of the groom, as more than likely, they will have attended more weddings than yourselves and therefore can suggest a wedding menu that they know from experience has gone down well in the past.

Wedding Reception Buffet

Each Wedding Caterer seems to have their own idea of just how many wedding guests at the wedding reception you should be catering for, many suggest that around 90% of the wedding guests is a good number, as some will have eaten before arriving, and others will still be full from the wedding breakfast. Saying that, of course some of the guests will probably eat enough for two or three! Ask the advice of your Wedding Caterer or of the hotel, they will know best from their experience how much food to prepare to satisfy your guests, and avoid both food and money wastage.

Wedding Cake

Will the wedding caterer provide the Wedding Cake as well? Or if you have sourced your Wedding Cake from elsewhere, will the wedding caterer provide you with a cake stand and ceremonial knife? Another good question to ask is where the Wedding Cake will be stored. Does the wedding caterer or hotel have adequate refrigeration facilities, where the cake will be safely protected from any damage?

Wedding Catering continued...

There are many other aspects to consider with wedding catering and we will cover these in further articles. The main points to bear in mind are to ask others for advice and their experience, remember that the wedding breakfast is likely to be the single biggest expense of your wedding day, and as with all the aspects of wedding planning - don't get too worked up about it, you'll be so excited you are now married, that you won't even remember eating most of it!