The best food they’ve ever had (and how it’s done)
Food is something that brings us together. People sit down to eat with family and friends as a way to connect and celebrate. It is one of the best settings for bonding with others. So on your wedding day it’s crucial that the food reflect the rest of the beauty of the event and be remembered as a positive experience. How is this achieved? By choosing a venue which is known for creating a fine dining experience even when your guests number in the hundreds.
This is tricky because traditional catering is generally nothing like a fine dining restaurant experience.
In a fine restaurant …
a large kitchen staff hand-preps components of each meal as it is ordered. As the components come together they are carefully placed in an artful manner on each plate.
“chefs are building intricate masterpieces of color and texture that sprawl across the plate in pristine decadence”
- from Fast Company’s article “How to Plate Food Like a 3-Star Michelin Chef”
An excellent, fine restaurant pays top dollar for the best and freshest ingredients, but in small batches, knowing that if certain menu items don’t get ordered there will be a great deal of waste. When done well this means your meal is incredibly fresh and delicious and beautifully plated like artwork.
The skill lies in getting completely different meals ready at the exact same time so all the plates at your table will go out at the same time, while still juggling prep of several other tables’ orders. This is incredibly difficult and requires a highly experienced team. But more importantly, only a small group of people can be served at a time and that’s why upscale restaurants are smaller and only seat a handful of tables per hour.
For a wedding, a large group of guests must be served all at once. This makes the fine-dining approach almost impossible.
Traditional catering takes the opposite approach.
Unfortunately, most wedding venues resort to using a traditional mass-produced catering buffet to feed many people at once. Food is typically prepped and cooked in advance, so that it can feed 150 people or more at the same time without a problem. This means using warmers and heat lamps to keep the food warm and often results in overcooked, dry food.
And there is no careful plating of each meal - it simply takes too long. So guests are free to serve themselves. If you’ve ever really watched this happen, it’s a bit unnerving. Guests poke at the food, glop it onto their plates and then poke it some more. They have to shake the serving spoon to get food onto their plates (like getting thick ketchup out of a bottle). It is not elegant.
Catering also tends to focus on lower cost ingredients and institutional volume packaging. They focus on not having any waste and cooking only what has been paid for in advance. Then a couple of cooks can organize the meal, with a handful of servers running chafing dishes to the buffet line as they are needed.
There is often no cooking done at all onsite. It is all brought in having been cooked either that morning or the day before as it is cheaper and easier than on-site preparation.
When guests think about attending a wedding…
they often will have a stereotypical assumption that the meal will be uninteresting and mediocre catered food, the event will be too long, will involve a great deal of waiting around, and will be confining.
A great wedding venue turns this stereotype on its head by incorporating elements of fine dining into a catering style approach.
You want your guests to leave remembering the food as part of why it was such an epic night so standard catering should never be an option. For guests to have a truly great experience, modifications must be made to traditional catering to ensure a delicious and elegant meal.
When Chanteclaire was started 20 years ago, we developed a clever system for improving catering, and crafted it to reach what we hope will be the best wedding meals our guests have ever had. To have a fine dining experience that is served to a hundred people or more at the same time, the food must be cooked in batches and served immediately in intervals as people come to the buffet line (as opposed to making all the food in advance and risking it becoming rubbery as the night goes on).
Chanteclaire’s upper management learned to cook while living in Italy and France, so we always buy top ingredients and keep recipes simple enough to let their quality shine through (the Italians are especially good at this). This requires a fully functional commercial kitchen attached to the dining room, with all the equipment of a restaurant plus additional convection ovens.
Because we are both venue and caterer, we have built custom furniture to hide all chafing dishes (those ugly square metal buffet dishes that keep the food warm) so the effect is one of elegant food stations, with staff at each to serve delicious, just-out-of-the-oven dishes.
Serving dishes are built into the counter, with staff behind. The staff makes your plate, so guests never touch the food.
Timeline
You can buy the finest ingredients and create the most beautiful dishes, but the final critical process to avoiding sub-par catered food is to serve it immediately after it’s cooked. This involves seamless coordination. For a group of hundreds of people, that can be a tricky. The Wedding Coordinator, DJ, and Catering Supervisor must be perfectly in sync. Guests have to be invited to the buffet line and served by staff at the line so it maintains order and class. At Chanteclaire our catering staff, planning staff and our day-of coordination staff all train together, every day, to make this process perfectly seamless. Because, if toasts go on for 20 minutes instead of the anticipated 4, it doesn’t matter how good your caterer is - the meat will be dry.
It’s up to the planning team to understand the menu prep so well that they can ensure guests are invited to dinner just as the meal is coming out of the oven. This could never be done without the catering staff and the planning team being intimately involved in crafting the evening together. Most venue owners have no idea what it will take to get the meal ready. How could they, if different caterers with different menus come in each week? It’s not possible to control something you know little about. It’s only when the venue owner emphasizes planning equally to catering that you get a seamless experience.