Wedding Caterers – Making Buffets Work

© Aleksey Kondratyuk | Dreamstime.com

More and more brides are moving away from the traditional sit-down wedding lunch or dinner and towards a more informal buffet meal. Some people see buffets as a cheap option but that often isn’t the case at all. Think gourmet dishes, beautifully presented, sushi, a wide variety of dishes to satisfy various dietary requirements, and you’ll see that a buffet can be as glamorous as you like... and as expensive as the dishes you choose!

One complaint about buffets at weddings is that guests might have to stand in line for ages waiting to serve themselves and older guests can find that tiring. So here are some suggestions on how to make buffets work in a wedding setting, so that everything runs smoothly.

1. Have serving staff to dish up
If you are offering hot dishes of various sorts, things work much better when your caterers serve the food, even at a buffet. They can  make sure that the plated presentation looks good, control portion sizes and make sure that the serving platters don’t look as if they have been ravaged by starving hoards.

2. Consider separate tables offering different foods
If you have guests with varied dietary requirements it can work well to have different food stations: for example a vegan table, a vegetarian table and a meat dishes table. Sign post them clearly and guests can help themselves without having to examine each dish closely.

3. Have serving staff usher one or two tables to the buffet at a time
The queues are often what put people off buffets, but these can easily be managed. Apooint a member of serving staff or even the MC to let each table know when it is their turn to serve themselves at the buffet. Things go much more smoothly when it is not crowded.

4. Have a platter of starters already at the tables
If you have large numbers of guests, it can take a while for everyone to get served. Those at teh last tables to get to the food may well be starving and irritable, especially if the drink is flowing freely. It can save the day if each table has a platter of starters at the table to nibble while they wait their turn at the buffet.

There are many other ways to make sure that the buffet is a success and your wedding caterers may well have their own suggestions to avoid it turning into a bun-fight.