Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Wedding Dinner!

Comment Written by natasha on June 23, 2010 – 5:00 am

Wedding food is a special kind of food, a kind of taste that rarely exceeds expectations. This is not to say that I have not had amazing, incredibly delicious food at weddings — of course I have! But most weddings end up with some kind of chicken, some kind of fish, and some kind of beef, with nothing particularly exceptional about any of them. Why is this?

Lots of reasons! There’s cost, caterering restrictions, and venue options. For example, if your venue doesn’t have a kitchen then your options are going to be different than if there is one available.

To Buffet or Not Buffet

The benefit of having a buffet is that you can try out a bunch of different types of food. For example, you can have a station of Italian food, a station of Japanese food, or, perhaps an ice cream bar.

Along the same train of thought, you can easily meet people’s dietary needs and desires. At one buffet wedding reception I attended, I was able to opt out of the vegetarian dish and the coconut shrimp, but I had some fantastic chicken and tacos!

The nice thing about buffets is that they can be less expensive than a sit down meal. You still need servers, but you dont need really nice diningware. That said, you probably need MORE plates than you would otherwise require, as people dispose of each plate that they use. (Consider our Green Wedding Tips when deciding whether to use paper or real dishes!) Also, having different serving stations or differnet types of food may require multiple kinds of caterers and therefore might add on to the expenses.

All that sounds great, so why have a sit-down meal?

A sit down meal is a bit more formal, which some people like. Servers handle everything and you dont need to worry about whether there’s enough of any particular kind of food. In general, with sit down meals, you can ask people what they want in advance and ensure that there is plenty of that kind of food.

In addition, a sit down meal allows you to select the food options that work for most people — and for your budget!

This is not to say that you have to have people milling around when you have a buffet dinner and you only sit with a more formal meal. I have been to several weddings where we are assigned seats at tables with beautiful centerpieces, selected tableware, dinnerware, and glassware. In those cases, we got up to get our food and returned to our assigned seat. Perhaps that is a happy medium: buffet style food with formalty!

What will you do? Happy eating!

~ Natasha