In the words of an icon, oops… I did it again.
I know I said that I’d fire these posts out and wouldn’t leave it so long in between, but alas.
For this post I wanted to chat about catering and seating – two of the most important things, as far as your guests are concerned.
We had been lucky enough to attend a few weddings in the years before ours, so had a rough idea of what the standard was; of course you may remember from my last post that our wedding reception was in a marquee and was both managed and organised by us.
This meant that having a standard meal served by waiting staff was out of the question.
We began thinking outside the box.
Food truck? Mega expensive.
Buffet? Lack of space in the marquee.
I can’t remember who suggested it, but the idea of a chippy came up and we were instantly sold; who doesn’t like a sausage supper?
To make things as easy as possible we decided that we’d give our guests the choice of three options and colour-coded the requests (I’ll mention the importance of this later). All we had to do was find a chippy that would deliver 97 (hot) dinners on a Saturday night.
We spent one Friday night in the Southside sampling chips anywhere close by Rouken Glen and eventually decided on Peters Chippie on Carnwadric Road in Thornliebank. The chips were TDF.
They were able to deal with the quantity we needed and had great customer service each time we spoke to them.
Don’t just take your suppliers word for it, try what they provide.
We had 96 people at our full-day and maybe another 40 or so at night, so ensuring that everyone was sitting next to someone they knew was our next challenge.
I started with me and Simon first, I don’t like the idea of a top table with everyone looking at me, so we decided on using trestle tables to make three long tables.
So I began with our table and who we knew would be on it; our parents, bridesmaids, groomsmen and their partners.
Then I looked at our families, we ended up filling a table each near enough – it wasn’t deliberate to separate them this way, but I was keen that people enjoyed their company and didn’t find it awkward – we’ve all been there.
At the end of the day though, people are just happy to have been invited along to share in your big day!
We had flipchart boards dotted around the site with the seating plan as with any wedding, and on this I colour coded the names. For example, if your name was in blue you had ordered fish and if it was in red you had ordered haggis.
Our table plans, labels on bottles, invites etc were all done using the free version of Canva – I can’t recommend it enough, plus you get a 30-day free trial so if you’re in a rush like us this is ideal.
We all know that weddings can be really expensive even as a guest, so instead of hiring a bar (which would have been great to keep things organised!) we opted for a BYOB situation.
On arrival we provided glasses of Prosecco and put bottles of white and red wine on the tables. My super creative mother-in-law and sister-in-law/bridesmaid extraordinaire/creative genius made us bottles of homebrewed Limoncello and Rhubarb Gin to keep everyone going.
It was class.
This meant people only had to bring what they wanted to drink themselves and could chip in with pals for bottles of spirits – we ended up acquiring a lot of booze the next day!
When it came to the evening part of the reception, we knew that we’d need to provide more food to the additional guests but also to soak up some of the copious amounts of alcohol!
One of my mum’s friends Kate is honestly one of the loveliest people I’ve ever met and offered to sort it for us so that was one less thing for me to deal with. I had never seen such as amazing spread – it was seriously cracking.
Doing as we do, however, we all got completely legless and I had busted my ankle in my wedding shoes before dinner – I maintain it was the wonky floor.
So maybe BYOB isn’t for everyone…