How I Planned My Wedding: Catering
A Wedding Planner's Personal Journey
Being a huge foodie, I knew choosing a caterer would be tough for us. Food and hospitality are incredibly important to me and my husband, and we wanted our wedding to be memorable and enjoyable for our guests. I only had two requirements for our caterer: 1) a flexible menu of amazing-tasting food, and 2) experienced and reliable staff.
From my experiences as a wedding planning, I've noticed that couples tend to overlook how much work a catering company does (and why they charge so much for their services). Catering sets up chairs, tables, linens, and place settings, runs your open bar while tray-passing hors d'oeuvres, and takes everything down during clean-up when your wedding is over - all while cooking and serving food for over a hundred people.
We eventually chose Park Avenue Catering after careful consideration, and it was one of the best decisions I made for our wedding. I worked directly with Anthony, one of their wedding specialists, who provided endless suggestions as we put together a menu for our guests (you can see our final selections in the photo above). Their food was A.M.A.Z.I.N.G (our guests still tell us our wedding had the best food ever), and their staff was one of the most professional and well-trained teams I have ever seen (I asked for my chairs to be lined up super straight cause I'm just an OCD planner like that, and they, along with my coordinator, made sure my chairs were straight). We also chose to serve dinner family style, because I love me a good buffet-style variety of food, but I hate having to get out of my seat to get it (please tell me that's not just me).
My only regret? Not eating enough cause I was wearing a tight dress!
Neither my husband nor I drink alcohol, so instead of the traditional bar, we opted for artisan glass-bottled sodas. Our favorite is Fentiman's ginger beer, so we purchased a variety from our local grocer (rose lemonade, mandarin orange, cola, and ginger beer) for our guests to enjoy. The other reason we picked these is because of how pretty the bottles look!
Deciding what to have for dessert on a regular day is already hard enough for me, but deciding what to have for dessert at our wedding was nearly impossible! Thankfully, I ended up finding Just Bakecause, who not only makes amazing pavlovas, macarons, and cakes, but has now become one of my dearest vendor friends. Next week's post is gonna be a sweet one!
all images by Meiwen Wang.