Trend Watch: Wedding Day Catering

Today’s weddings are so much more than your choice of beef or chicken. Brides and grooms are increasingly putting their money where their mouth is, prioritizing deliciousness and allotting much of their budget for memorable meals. Even at classic events with plated, sit-down dinners, caterers find unique ways to inject some personality into the food. Here are some ways to think outside the box and stay on trend when catering your wedding in 2018 and beyond.

Adventurous Eats

Spice things up! More exotic, ethnic foods are finding their way into today’s wedding menus. This doesn’t necessarily mean that couples are opting exclusively for fiery curry dinners or a spread of sushi. But couples are increasingly adding some global flavor to their day. An easy way to do this is with your appetizers. You can get a little adventurous with the food offerings, while perhaps still serving a more classic meat-and-potatoes meal for dinner. Something for everyone!

Palate Pleasers

Whether it’s gluten-free, vegetarian, vegan, or paleo, it’s more common than ever for wedding guests to have dietary restrictions. This doesn’t mean, however, that you have to sacrifice delicious, quality food. A good caterer will be plenty adept at crafting a menu that takes any specific needs into account while appeasing tastes of all kinds. If you yourself, the bride or groom, are the ones with dietary preferences, you should absolutely take those into account. But be careful not to push your beliefs or restrictions on others.

Help Yourself!

More than just sit-down, plated dinners, wedding meals are increasingly inventive with the way in which food is served. Consider having food served family style, with larger portions brought to the center of each table and guests helping themselves. Guests could also get up and moving with either a buffet-style set up or a series of food stations. The fun thing about food stations: It allows for ample variety and mingling. Take stations to the next level by bringing in local food trucks for unbeatable energy.

Local Love

Food trucks aren’t the only, nor the easiest, way to show some local love with your wedding day menu. Caterers are increasingly working with locally-sourced, sustainable, and in-season products and produce. On the whole, the culinary industry has embraced these movements, so it only follows that such considerations are now present in wedding catering. You can also think outside the box with who you approach for catering, perhaps taking your favorite neighborhood restaurants into account.

Sweet Stuff

Dessert and donut bars continue to be popular, often times outshining the traditional wedding cake (though who says you can’t have both?!). But such sweet stuff doesn’t stop at donuts, cake pops, and cupcakes. Nowadays, it’s on trend to go big, with dessert bars chockfull of gelato with chocolate-dipped cones, scrumptious s’mores, soft pretzels with toppings, and mini pies galore.

Daytime Deliciousness

Brunch has never been bigger, and brunch weddings give couples a delicious array of breakfast foods to consider catering. There are tasty egg dishes, waffle bars with sweet and savory toppings, layered pancake wedding cakes, breakfast cocktails, and so much more. A brunch wedding really opens up a wide range of scrumptious daytime food options that aren’t your average wedding fare. Guests will be buzzing about your brunch wedding for years to come — and that’s not just the mimosas talking!