Menus
Most wedding catering is sold as a package. Menu A, Menu B, Menu C, pick one, done. It is efficient, and I understand why the industry works that way. But it produces weddings where the food is perfectly nice and completely interchangeable, and nobody remembers a single thing they ate.
The best meals I cook start somewhere else entirely - with a conversation that has almost nothing to do with catering.
When I sit down with a couple I am not really asking whether they want chicken or beef. I want to know where they met. What they cook for each other on a Sunday. Where they went on the holiday they still talk about. Whether there is a dish from someone's grandmother that means something.
That is where a menu with any character comes from. One couple honeymooned in northern Spain, so we built the whole thing around the fire cooking they fell in love with there. Another had a Welsh side and an Argentine side to the family, which turned into a menu that quietly nodded to both. Neither of those is on anybody's package list.
If your menu could have been served at anyone else's wedding, we have not finished designing it.
- Cai
A worry I hear a lot is that bespoke means fussy, or expensive, or that it will end up as clever food nobody actually wants to eat. It should not.
Personalising a menu is usually about small, deliberate decisions rather than wholesale reinvention. The cut of meat that means something to you. A sauce from a place you love. Serving it in the style you eat at home instead of the style weddings are supposed to use. The food still needs to be generous and delicious - it just stops being anonymous. Our guide to planning an outdoor wedding menu covers the practical shape of it.
One thing does not bend to preference, and that is what is genuinely good in the month you are getting married. I would rather build your menu around what is at its best in September than force a spring dish because it was on a list you saw in January.
That constraint improves things. It narrows the options to the ones actually worth eating, and it means your food tastes of the time of year you chose to marry. Our seasonal guide sets out what is at its peak when.
Personalisation includes the people who cannot eat what everyone else is eating. Vegetarian, vegan and allergy-aware options should be designed with the same care as the centrepiece, not assembled apologetically at the end. If a guest is handed something that looks like an afterthought, they know, and so does everyone at their table. There is more on how we handle that here.
Tell us about the two of you, not just your guest count. The food follows from there.
Start the ConversationYou are choosing the food that several dozen people you love will eat together on one of the more significant days of your life. It should taste of something. Preferably of you.
- Cai
