I am beyond words thrilled to be featured as Southern Weddings magazine‘s Southern Bride of the Month for June!!!! See Emily’s post here!!! Look for shoutouts to the following StudioWed vendors: A Delightful Day, Brocade Designs, The Bride Room, and Hardink Calligraphy!
~ Kelly
Last week I left you with a cliffhanger ending — We figured out the perfect solution to our ongoing catering dilemma! After nixing our original caterer {after their repeated unresponsiveness and negligent business practices} and the idea of doing-it-ourselves {once Mom pointed out realistically how much work it would be and time spent away from guests to feed a crowd of over 200}, we decided to….
Drumroll…
…Have a coffee and desserts reception!
Since I’m such a traditional bride in many areas, certain nontraditional elements really strike my fancy. I’m such a weddingaholic, many evenings are spent doodling/penning my wedding dreams and what I would do if I could change up everything about the wedding. {Examples: A sunset-hued brunch wedding featuring my favorite dress, a romantic elopement with Veuve Clicquot and a piece of tiramisu set in Charleston, beachside I do’s with palm fronds, a sweet orange grove afternoon affair…} A frequent wedding fantasy of mine involves toasting with cappuccinos and a spread of delicious desserts. For six months of our engagement, I’ve had plans to provide a full meal for our guests {as is custom in this day and age}. While I thought it was veering too far from tradition to switch over to a dessert-and-coffee party, it’s turned out to be the perfect fit.
My parents had a cake-and-punch reception back in 1981. We’ll be doing much the same, just with the addition of a few extra tasty treats and an espresso bar! How funny that we’re actually reverting back to the MORE traditional take on weddings!
My biggest qualm about the change was timing and guest retention. I much preferred an evening affair to an afternoon party {it’s more formal, you can have late-night dancing, everyone doesn’t leave early because they’re starving, and it’s automatic evening plans for friends!}, but even that’s proven to be a little challenging logistically. We do have a significant number of elderly guests and some children invited and don’t want to cause an inconvenience having it terribly late in the evening. Although we toyed with starting the wedding at 6:30PM (an hour after our original plans), we finally settled on 7PM so that everyone will have time to eat beforehand and make the 30-minute drive from Nashville. We cut down on the time allotted for our our cocktail hour and bumped up the cake cutting before dances (so everyone doesn’t have to salivate all the way through those before they get to dig into the deliciousness!).
I’m thrilled with our plan for the wedding now! I’ll reveal more details about the specifics of our dessert and coffee reception as they come, but for now — so happy to have our problem solved! And much thanks to Hillary of Brocade Designs for being my sounding board/outsourcer/problem solver/advisor throughout the great catering debate!! She’s been my Wedding Fairy Godmother throughout this whole process — and every bride should have one!
~ Kelly
If you read my post last week, you saw that our catering experience has been less-than-stellar throughout wedding planning. The whole battle has been a back-and-forth debacle of endless brainstorming, problem-solving, head-palming, and pacing across the floor stressed to the max.
We thought we’d come to a nice solution last week when we decided to just self-cater the affair, much like we did for my sister’s wedding in 2007. But when it came to facing reality, it was evident that self-catering conflicted largely with our vision for the day and priorities as far as how we wanted to spend the day and experience the company of our loved ones.
{Pictures are from my sister (and MOH) Dani’s wedding July 2007 —
the inspiration behind our self-catering/DIY wedding dreams!}
As you can imagine, self-catering any large-scale event is a big undertaking. It’s definitely doable, but can be costly and definitely stressful. It takes a lot of time, too. While most brides probably don’t think through the logistics of how their steak and shrimp bruschetta and miniature BLT sliders are composed and presented… if they did, they’d have a much larger appreciation for those people slaving away in the kitchen. SO MUCH time and energy and effort goes into making food for 200 guests: cutting, slicing, washing fruits and vegetables; seasoning, grilling, cooling, reheating meat; baking, slicing, broiling, buttering bread… the more you start to think about it the longer the list becomes.
The number one reason we decided to go with a caterer in the first place was not because we felt that the food quality/taste would be superior (my parents are superb in the kitchen, y’all), but because I want to be a Bride on my wedding day, and I want a Father and Mother of the Bride that play the part of Father and Mother of the Bride. I want to wake up with all my girlfriends, drink some coffee out on the screened-in porch, eat some cinnamon toast, giggle and chat and excitedly await the afternoon to come, get prettied up in my parents’ bedroom, play with my nephews, slip into my dress (without a rush), get the most beautiful pictures taken, see my future husband for the first time on our wedding day (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), hold his hand and kiss him and cry and be swung around by him and dwell in his loveliness, pose with my friends and family on the farm, cool down with some lemonade and fans, caravan over to the venue, gush over how gorgeous everything looks (and probably cry), wait excitedly for the music to start, my mother to walk down the aisle, and then hear Mary Alice say, “It’s time!”, cry again, and make my way to say my I-Do’s.
Here’s how I don’t want to spend my wedding day: Waking up to 12 family members crashing around in the kitchen, frantically throwing things into the oven/grill/stove/fridge/sink, have two little restless boys being ignored or shooed out of everyone’s way, listening to chaos, only being able to see my mother for thirty-second bursts of time as I’m getting my makeup done, having to radio in my mother to have her get her makeup done, waiting twenty minutes longer to start family pictures because the rolls still haven’t risen enough to bake, driving back and forth a hundred times to the Livery Stables to get all the food transported and appropriately refrigerated/cooled/heated/simmered/sauteed, having to find a way to politely decline the very kind but unwanted offer of meatballs cooked and brought by a well-meaning relative, having 30 people see me in my wedding regalia before the wedding starts, speeding over to the venue for the last time before we’re rushed upstairs, setting out all the food during “cocktail hour” that only half the guests actually get to enjoy, seeing my mother picking up plastic plates as they pile up on guests’ tables while I’m dancing with my father…. etc.
I hired a caterer in hopes of eliminating the stress of doing it ourselves. We chose a venue that would take care of things so that my family wouldn’t have to. For better or worse, that caterer did not work out.
She did give me an estimate. She sent it late Sunday night, after one of my father’s coworkers (a friend of hers) asked her about it after hearing our distress over the situation. She’s, of course, busy. My wedding is not number 1 priority for her, clearly. And that’s to be expected — I realize, as a wedding professional myself, that the world does NOT revolve around my wedding. Thousands of weddings go on every single Saturday. I am one of many brides. However, two months prior to the wedding date is not an appropriate timeline to send a first-draft catering proposal, especially when it has been requested for the past six months. It is not unreasonable for me to set a deadline prior to the two-months-out mark. She did not meet my deadline. She will not be receiving any more business from me. We will still have our wedding at the same venue, but we will not be using their catering services. Or any services beyond unlocking the door and turning on the A/C.
{That’s me in the blue polo jumping for the bouquet! While I didn’t catch it, I DID meet my very own future fiance just one short month after this was taken!}
For those wondering, her price was in line with the original estimate she’d given us at our showing of the property back in November ($10pp). She did, however, add on the $100 kitchen rental fee that she’d said would only be charged if we brought in our own caterer. She added a few random charges that didn’t make complete sense to me and a few labor expenses that I absolutely understood. Her estimate was within our allotted budget. If she’d sent it to us in a timely manner (or even an untimely manner that still met the deadline I explicitly laid out for her), we would have been happy (or at least appeased) to book them, put everything behind us, and let them take care of the day for us. I’d have written a check and gone on my merry way. Unfortunately for the both of us (perhaps), that was not the case.
I don’t believe in doing business with someone (or some company) I cannot trust, rely upon, speak honestly with, or feel comfortable dispensing responsibility to. Even though the price was right, the person was not.
So what does a bride without a caterer do? She gets resourceful. And creative. And pulls from her lovely little inventory of wedding ideas and comes up with something that is a lovely little substitution.
…. to be continued!!!!
Want to find out what we decided? Stay tuned for next week’s installment! :)
Throughout my recaps of our wedding planning written for this blog, I really haven’t had anything negative to say up to this point. Sure — working with a limited budget has been stressful, finding a date seemed near-impossible for so long, and finding the perfect dress to fit my 6 bridesmaids was less than a cakewalk. But I haven’t had a completely negative experience in this process until this point in time.
Ultimately, I think I set myself up for failure in the area of food & beverage. Drew and I wrote out a priorities list back whenever we started planning and have since tweaked it some, but as a whole, we knew what things we wanted to really invest in and what things we didn’t really care about. As you can guess, food was on the bottom of the list.
As a wedding planner myself, I know catering is expensive. Good food doesn’t come cheap {but apparently neither does mediocre food}. On top of paying simply for the products your guests will be consuming, you also have to budget for plates, utensils, napkins, linens, the works. One of the reasons we chose our venue was for its all-inclusivity: The Livery Stables provides tables, basic hotel-style stackable chairs, and china/crystal/utensils. They also offer in-house catering, at what was originally quoted to us {back in November, when we booked} at an outrageously low price. Honestly, those two features were main reasons why we chose our venue to begin with.
{Wedding Food I Love: Strawberry butter, to accompany a biscuit bar!}
Let’s back up a moment. In November when the Great Venue Hunt was on, Drew and I talked to our first-choice location about hosting our wedding there, and were completely sticker-shocked at their required $40++ per person food costs (and labor, and cake cutting fees, and gratuities, and $18pp — beer and wine only– bar charges, the list goes on…). It was a deal-breaker for us, racking up the venue charges alone to over $15,000. {So in other words, that’s not including my dress, photography, videography, flowers, entertainment, our cake, invitations, etc.} So when the NEXT place we looked at offered $6-12 per person catering and a much lower venue rental fee, it was music to our ears.
{Wedding Food I Love: Mini ice cream cones!!! I love minis and I LOVE ice cream!}
I should’ve known after I told Mary Alice and Hillary about the $6-12pp quote and they LAUGHED. Out LOUD. I should’ve known! Brides, take heed. If your caterer estimates their prices at $6 to $12 per person, things will probably not end well for you. You’re either going to be eating Tostitos and salsa, be extremely understaffed and unsatisfied, or end up with absolutely nothing in the end… because let’s face it. $6 to $12 per person is not a realistic amount of money to spend on catering. {SORRY! If you’re as cheap as we are, just splurge on the cake and serve champagne or coffee and go simple. Or do brunch. But you probably can’t even do brunch that cheaply, so really just give it up because it’s not going to work out. Sorry, sorry, sorry.}
So anyways, we booked the venue. We tasted the food. {Mediocre, but decent for being so cheap.} We asked for an estimate based on the menu we toyed around with. We heard nothing for three months. We met in April with the catering manager (also the venue owner) to discuss a more specific menu and “finalize” some ideas. We asked for an estimate based on THAT menu. Nothing. We emailed three weeks after the meeting and were promised that a proposal was coming that evening. Nothing. We emailed the following weekend. Nothing. This has continued for weeks. My mother, fed up with hearing nothing, called our catering manager/venue owner and was told over the phone that the proposal had been sent but that she would send it again that afternoon. NOTHING. Eight zillion emails later, we have still not heard a SINGLE WORD about the missing proposal. We have given her multiple email addresses to submit it to, multiple phone numbers to call to explain what’s going on, offered to pick it up IN PERSON — all to no avail.
{Wedding Food I Love: Chicken and waffles!}
Looks like someone can’t deliver their $6-12 catering prices. Or doesn’t care enough to want the business.
I honestly don’t know what the issue is (clearly — communication has not been substantial at any given point of time) and can only postulate what could possibly be going on. I have given every opportunity to explain, try multiple avenues of transmission, etc. We have been polite but insistent, but at this point we are absolutely fed up with the unprofessionalism our venue/caterer has exhibited. {Another golden nugget of advice for other brides: If your venue owner or caterer or — God forbid, planner– ever tells you, “This is just my hobby! Some people like scrapbooking; I do weddings for fun!” you better RUN LIKE HELL! Run! Flee! GET OUT OF THERE!}
Needless to say, we will no longer be using their catering services.
Instead, we’re going to have one spectacular wedding cake and take care of feeding our friends ourselves. Catering is not an area I would ever recommend to brides to DIY (by any means — if you’re looking for a legitimate, wonderful, will-deliver-what-they-promise caterer, please refer to our StudioWed caterers!! they’re FANTASTIC!). However, at two months out from the wedding day, having taken for granted that we would have cheap food all along, it’s too late to restructure our budget and book a legitimate caterer. This is one lesson we probably should have learned in January, but for better or worse, this is where we are.
{Wedding Drinks I Love: Lemonade — with pink striped straws, of course!}
So, my family will be buying, preparing, and serving our wedding meal. Fortunately, my parents do have the experience of having catered both my sister’s and cousin’s weddings in years past (as well as countless parties I’ve thrown growing up). It will not be professional, it will not be overly fancy, but it will be tasty and satisfy our need for a meal (seeing as our wedding starts at 5:30PM and I’d prefer for guests not to leave right away). It will be a family affair. It will probably be extremely stressful (as it always is, having to get things ready on the DAY OF OUR WEDDING). There will be sacrifices made. But we made our bed and we will now lie in it.
And no one will go hungry. That’s the thing that counts, right?
