When it comes to catering for a wedding, you are usually expecting something like a 3-course meal with a set menu to choose from. However, catering can come in all shapes and sizes and can be delivered to all sorts of locations too.
While professional businesses are offering the Best Catering in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, if your event is for a smaller number of people or on a smaller budget, you can find small businesses online or off social media.
Some caution about going the social media route should be applied to the cleanliness of the operation. Food being catered should ideally be prepared in a restaurant-type kitchen with restaurant food standards applied to the preparations. Particularly for cooked foods.
A Hastily Arranged Wedding
Our wedding was arranged with not a lot of lead-in time. At the same time, we were arranging to move overseas just two days after the wedding. We also had a couple of other personal issues going on to cause distractions and consume our time leading up to the wedding
As it was the second marriage for both of us, we didn’t want a big church wedding. My wife’s family all lived overseas, and I only had a small family, so we realized we didn’t need to hire a huge hall or book out a restaurant.
With a guest list of 20 – 30 people, the location was originally to be at a friend’s home, but we soon realized this might be asking too much of the friend on top of other duties they would be performing, plus it took much of the control of the event out of our hands.
So, we decided to have the wedding in our home.
Knowing that we would have a lot of work ahead of us as we started packing the following day, the last thing we wanted to be doing was to prepare all the food and then clean it all up afterward.
Catering the Wedding
Having most of the food catered for the event was going to be a huge time saver, and while it came at a cost, this was probably no more expensive than if we had purchased the food items ourselves and then had the time to prepare it all.
Our wedding was set for early afternoon, so we expected our guests to have eaten at least one meal that day before arriving. Therefore, we didn’t feel the need to cater a huge meal and instead went for a finger-food option, with nothing needing to be cooked by the caterers.
Our choice of caterer came from a referral from one of our closest friends. The caterer was not a professional business. It was more of a family operation that catered for church gatherings and gained referrals from there for small family events.
We had arranged the wedding cake separately and had some meals cooked ourselves and sitting on hot plates Just before the ceremony.
Our caterer arrived mid-morning and set up two tables with tablecloths and set out several trays and placed a variety of finger food on the trays.
A professional caterer would probably arrive with the trays already prepared, and it was slightly annoying as we were preparing last-minute ‘things’ to have a few extra people in the house, hovering over these tables preparing food items.
However, it turned out to be a fantastic day, if a little cramped during the ceremony inside. But once people collected their food and could venture outside into our sunny yard, we couldn’t have been happier.
Easy Clean-up
Perhaps the best part of having a caterer at the event occurred a few hours after the last of our guests had departed when the caterers returned and quickly cleared out everything that they had brought. This made it easy for us to clean up the rest of the kitchen and living areas, knowing that we could face the next day of packing with a clean and tidy house.
Even though the catering for our wedding was not the major focus of the day and the numbers catered for were small, the decision to use a caterer took a lot of stress out of the day for my wife and me.
For a bigger event with larger numbers, particularly if held in the evening, a catered meal, delivered by professionals would be an essential element of a wedding.
