Catering for your Wedding Day

Wedding Catering Tips for Your Big Day

Choosing the Perfect Wedding Catering Service

Catering for your wedding day is an essential part of your day. Dealing with catering providers is part of most brides wedding plans. A caterer normally provides food and drinks and they have an important role in your wedding.  Guests will remember your food at your wedding as an everlasting memory of your day.
 
If the wedding reception venue offers this service, it is also possible that you don’t need to worry about hiring an external caterer. Even if catering is not provided by the reception venue, they may be able to recommend some to you. If your event manager, recommends a caterer, you should still do your homework. Just like any other vendor, a caterer should be able to provide you with several references. You should always contact the referees and get feedback from past brides.  You can even ask on Facebook discussion groups such as New Zealand Wedding Discussion Forum to get insights on what a company as like.

You should ask about reliability, trustworthiness, quality, and related issues. Also take into account group size, a caterer may be able to cater for a small size, but fail to cater if you have large wedding numbers.

There are four different styles of catering:

Seated Dinner – Seated dinner setting will normally require more staff than a buffet. Serving the food requires more severs. With a seated dinner, you will need more tables and chairs because most of the guests will eat at the same time. A seated dinner offers less flexibility for your guests, because they usually have a couple of options to choose from. To simplify the process, menu options should be included with the wedding invitations so your guests can choose which selection they prefer. The pre-selection process enables you to work with your caterer on the final count. 

Buffet –Buffet gives your guests more flexibility, and they don’t all have to eat at the same time. A buffet dinner also gives your guests more options to customise their food selection. The buffet requires fewer servers and less staff. Guests can pick and choose what they like. In addition to the obvious advantage of a more flexible dinner, your guest can go back for seconds. 

Grazing tables/cocktail type – grazing tables where guests pick and choose a range of snacks and nibbles they want to eat, where they effectively ‘graze’  are a popular choice for after the ceremony.  A selection of smaller plates over a number of hours is a great choice as the price of a full sit down dinner can be out of reach, if you have 200 guests to cater for.

Food trucks – There are many types of food trucks available for weddings now.  They come in and cook everything in their truck and serve from the truck.  Often wood fired pizzas are done this way. This extends to dessert to where you can hire a Mr Whippy van to serve your guests ice cream.
 
Also remember, with all of these options, make sure guests advise you of any allergies or food preference requirements.