Wedding food: menus, service styles and feeding everyone well

A plated dinner is the most formal: every guest is served the same courses at the same moment, which keeps a long evening on schedule and suits speeches between courses. It needs meal choices collected in advance and enough staff to serve every table at once.

Family style puts big dishes on each table to pass around. It is generous and talkative, and it breaks the ice at a table of strangers. It needs wide tables, because the platters take up room.

A buffet gives guests choice and moves people around the room, at the cost of queues. Food stations, a pasta counter, a grill, a mezze table, are a buffet in smaller pieces: shorter queues, more theatre, and a natural fit for a relaxed or Mediterranean wedding.

Ask on the RSVP rather than guessing: a meal choice if you serve a plated dinner, and a free line for allergies and dietary needs. Vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, nut allergies, kosher or halal where it applies: the caterer can handle all of them, but only if they know by name and by table.

Give the caterer the list two to three weeks before the day, with each guest's table, so the right plate reaches the right person without anyone having to explain themselves at dinner.

On MyEventOS you add the questions you need to the reply form, and each guest's answers arrive with their reply, ready to pass on.

Plan roughly one drink per guest per hour, more during the first hour and around the toasts, less once the dancing starts. A welcome drink as guests arrive, wine with dinner, something to toast with, and an open bar or a few signature cocktails later.

Have water on every table and a good alcohol-free option that is more than juice. The guests who are driving, pregnant or not drinking will notice that you thought of them.

The cake is a moment as much as a dessert. Many couples now cut a smaller cake for the photographs and serve a dessert table alongside: local sweets, fruit, small tarts, the baklava an aunt insisted on. It feeds more people, more variety, for less.

Dinner was hours ago and the dancing has been going since. A late-night snack around eleven, something warm and easy to eat standing up, is the most remembered food of many weddings: souvlaki, pizza slices, toasties, a coffee bar.

Book the tasting two to three months ahead, once the menu is roughly settled. Bring whoever has opinions, and decide there rather than afterwards.

Final numbers usually go to the caterer two to three weeks before the wedding. Remember the people who are not guests but still eat: the band, the photographer, the planner. Most caterers offer a simpler meal for them at a lower price.