What's the worst meal you've been served at a wedding?

[Higgeldypiggeldy35]

I'm veggie so unfortunately have had my fair share of shitty wedding meals as the vegetarians often seem to get shafted but this one takes the biscuit. Fancy wedding, very expensive and exclusive venue, meat eaters had a feast and it looked amazing, I was served......a grilled mushroom, and it was cold. This place is probably £100 per head at the very least and the best they could rustle up for a vegetarian was a mushroom. So, make me feel better, what's the worst meal you've been served?
This is meant to be light hearted 🐱

We went to a wedding set at the most beautiful venue they'd really thrown a lot of money at the venue/location. It was a 11.30am wedding but a couple of hours drive away. We had breakfast at around 9am, we thought they'd provide nibbles or something after the ceremony around lunch time. Nope. We moved the the venue and they'd paid for a drinks package so these waitresses kept coming out with drinks (I was pregnant!!), it got to about 4pm and everyone was staring at where the waitresses kept coming from hoping for a tray of food as everyone (apart from me) got slowly sozzled. Nope just more drinks. The bar didn't even sell crisps too!! We eventually sat down for the meal at about 5.30/6. Most people were on their way to drunk. Food was amazing, I mean it could have been rubbish but we were all starving. Every crumb was devoured. Evening there was a buffet too and it was fine. I just have no idea why they scrimped on daytime nibbles with such an early wedding. It could have been an amazing wedding, they'd thought of everything else, just forgot to feed people. When we got married people were fed all day long, it's one mistake I was not going to make!

Food poisoning from one wedding. Disgusting chicken and loads of mayonnaise-y sides 🤮

@Higgeldypiggeldy35

I'm veggie so unfortunately have had my fair share of shitty wedding meals as the vegetarians often seem to get shafted but this one takes the biscuit. Fancy wedding, very expensive and exclusive venue, meat eaters had a feast and it looked amazing, I was served......a grilled mushroom, and it was cold. This place is probably £100 per head at the very least and the best they could rustle up for a vegetarian was a mushroom. So, make me feel better, what's the worst meal you've been served? This is meant to be light hearted 🐱

I also recall attending a posh wedding where the food was just standing-up canapes, when we returned early evening to the small hotel where a lot of us were staying we found the restaurant was closed because they were doing a wedding and we were miles from anywhere else. Luckily the evening barbecue buffet had so much left over that a waiter brought is a huge platter!

I went to a lunchtime wedding where the food was excellent but not served until late afternoon. People were starving. And drunk. So it's not just about the quality and quantity, but the timings.

@ILikeBrie

So....you went to an Indian wedding and were surprised to be given Indian food?

@ClawedButler my friend is from an Indian family she was marrying a English lad (she's English too but has Indian heritage), I described it as an Indian wedding but it wasn't advertised as such. I assumed it'd be normal wedding food when we got the invites, hence why we ended up stuck without anything to feed our children all day. I assumed they'd have normal kids meals like they do at any other wedding I've ever been to... nope. A 3 year old was expected to eat burn your mouth off curry with bones in 😂!

@BillyJoe111

We were really honest with people at our wedding, told them we were broke so couldn’t buy any alcohol as the three course lunch in the pub for everyone had taken all our money (it was just a reg office, my dress was £5 from a charity shop, all the money we had went on feeding people).

we had everyone to ours first and we did a brunch - massive amounts of bagels, sandwiches, fruit, drinks before the reg office.

Then a late lunch and that was it. We had the back room of the pub and a little bit of the garden all eve, they could stick around and have a drink with us or go home or somewhere else no pressure we made that clear on the invite (we were in london, most came from elsewhere a few said they were looking forward to a night out elsewhere
after).

Didn’t stop people moaning on the day that there was no evening entertainment or food even though we made it clear there wasn’t going to be, we apologised when we invited people that we couldn’t afford to buy drinks and they would have to buy their own from the pub bar.

They were mainly all dh friends as i’m a billy no mates, some were so offended they were vile to him after and some never spoke to him again. One even sent him the receipt from nando’s and expected him to pay as they had been hungry in the evening

Lunch was a bit shit but you get what you pay for and dh wanted lots of his friends there so what can you do on a tight budget.

Sometimes there isn’t anything you can do to stop people moaning about a wedding!

I really feel for you, BillyJoe. Your situation is totally different to many of these horror stories. You're right though, some people are so lacking in any awareness about differing budgets for these things, it's as though they expect the wedding to be about them rather than the couple getting married. You gave fair warning and did your best, don't feel bad.

@ILikeBrie

An Indian wedding I went to, was done on the cheap as the bride and groom would rather spend the money on honeymoon, they could have had a big wedding (and fed us) had they wanted.

Wedding was in the morning so we were served a vegan buffet of Indian bits for lunch, you know samosas etc, they were vegan and tasted gross (it was so that they could be sure it was halal). Our children don't like Indian food so they ate some breadsticks we had on us. Onto the reception it was Indian again - curry. The curry was meat but it was cheap meat and still contained bones, it was way too spicy too. I like spice but I'm breastfeeding so try to avoid spicy curry as it upsets the baby's tummy, so I had rice and naan. Some of the other guests couldn't eat spice, they also had plain rice. The curry came with this white milky thing in a jug which the people on our table thought was a sauce and poured allover the curry, only to look around and realise it was actually a drink. Our children didn't have anything (bar a pot of ice cream, that they handed out for dessert and we ate with the teeny plastic spoons attached to the cardboard pot). Oh and it was a dry wedding too (religious reasons), eating terrible food drinking pop 🙈. Thankfully it was wrapped up by 6 and we could go and get some food! I love the person who got married but it was a long hungry day for us and cost us 2 expensive nights in a hotel as it was 5 hours drive away. Pretty sure the cost of our hotel stay was bigger than the wedding budget 😆.

I imagine you think this is a vaguely funny story about bad wedding food like the rest of the thread but it sounds more like white people being snide about brown peoples food. You got plain rice because you can't eat spice and can't tell the difference between a drink and a sauce...the joke is not on the providers on this one.

Worst was the hog roast in a filed with marquee. Worst was the toilet facilities which was I kid you not an open trench for the men and portaloos for the women which may have had hand sanitizer in them originally but had run out by the time I used them that evening. And then everyone was delving into the pile of rolls for the hog roast . Really grim

And I am embarrassed to say my daughters as well which we were only invited to and had no role in planning.

I found out the day before she was not catering for allergies etc despite her knowing her uncle, cousin and grandmother were gluten intolerant and one was diabetic. No idea about the guzillion friends they had invited . I hastily arranged an alternative dessert for them the day before of some m and s fruit salads which tbh was better than nothing! So sorry if you were there and weren’t catered for.

The wedding where the bride made a fuss about how much she wanted loads of children at her wedding and encouraged everyone to take their DC for the whole day. Then announced just before lunch that there would be no separate meals served for children- they could have spare plate and share with their children. DH and I are veggie and the veggie option was a very very small goats cheese tartlet and about 3 sweet potato chips. As the place was about an hour's drive from anywhere with shops DH and I gave our 2 DC our food and had to wait until the evening buffet before we could eat.

I've also been to a buffet with not enough food, and we weren't even the last table there. I think they had enough food for half the guests. It was not fun.

@ILikeBrie you sound so ignorant

Chikapu

EspressoDoubleShot
I’m vegetarian too, worst meal was cup a soup in a bowl
I really hope carrot crush was also on the menu!

@ManifestDestinee yikes I like curry, I didn't pour the drink on my food, our friends did! I don't get the brown people thing 😬 this is one of my oldest friends, I'm a bit insulted you think my post was about that! Food was a disaster and we couldn't get drunk to make things better! It could have been English food and it'd been a disaster if it was vegan only and then bad meat and too much spice, no food for children... 😬

I've been to two weddings which were similar; middle of know where with self service meals where the B&G had vastly underestimated the amount of food. At one of these weddings my table was last up, we just about managed to rustle up some leftovers for the kids on the table but the adults went without. The B&G apologised for guests being greedy but we were sat next to the self-service station, most guests just took a normal portion - there just wasn't enough food. We left early because we were hungry as did other guests (who we saw in the nearest restaurant).

There was an excellent wedding I went to where the meal ended up being underwhelming because it was a roast beef dinner at 12.30pm when it was 33 degrees outside. Everyone was asking for the veggie option as it was a lighter meal but they only had enough for the actual vegetarians. That wedding had a lot of money spent on it with plenty of food and a free bar - good times!

You can be as insulted as you like, your post was ignorant and kinda racist.

My aunts wedding. Not enough food, so I had to buy 3 bags of walkers crisps

Undercooked bbq food. A friend of DH and his wife hired caterers, so they cooked on the day in front of us and it was all half raw. Several people tried to complain and were basically told you get what your given. Safe to say most of us didn't really eat, and there's no was buffet at the evening reception so we left early to grab food on the way home.

We've also been to a wedding with a hog roast that ran out before our table. Worse still they'd plastered margarine on the rolls.
DS was young and didn't like pork so I'd hoped to have two rolls for him, but we weren't allowed that.

They did have a good dessert spread as all the local folk had made and brought something along.

@ManifestDestinee not sure how it was racist? If I'd written the same thing about a wedding and someone mistook a jug that looked like a food jug for sauce you'd think nothing of it. If I'd written the same thing and ommited that the cuisine was Indian and it was a dry wedding with crap food that was too spicy that too would be ok. I only said it was Indian to explain why half the food was strictly vegan and the other half was meat, 2 different venues, first couldn't do halal. Funnily there was a vegan who they hadn't catered for, I've no idea what she ate in the end.

At a conference in New Orleans years ago, I'd ordered the veggie meal as I can't eat any fish or seafood.
Veggie lunch was a fruit plate - no protein, just fruit...
Dessert was also a fruit plate which exactly the same fruit on it

Not a food, but a cup of coffee which may have had a bit of milk in but definitely had more fabric softener in. I can say it was fabric softener because it tasted like the brand smelled.
DH also got a tea - nothing weird about it.
Didn't drink it all but even what I drank made me very worried.

What seemed like cuppa soup ( there was powder at the bottom) lemon and chickpea flavour, nothing solid in it just boiling water and powder. Then a really low quality pork belly, absolutely all fat. I can't remember dessert

[quote sashh]A wedding in Scotland, I was a work colleague so invited to the evening do but not the main thing.

It was a cèilidh and fantastic fun, half way through they stopped and served coffee and tea and wedding cake and that was it.

I thought maybe it was a Scottish thing and bought chips later on.

The best weddings I have been to have been at people's homes. My cousin (this was in Australia) got married in her back yard where we then had food.

The other was a friend who had very little money, and I mean tot he extent her wedding ring is silver. She had a buffet delivered by the local sandwich hop, similar to Greggs so pies, pastries and sandwiches, no one was hungry.

The bar was extortionately priced and after an hour refused to serve tap water as it was hot and all the guests were thirsty but did not want to pay £5.50 for a glass of soft drink

This is illegal, please report tot he council, they can lose their licence for this. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39881236[/quote]
I ended up doing the food for my own wedding as the money I was going to use was not available in time (long story).
I was super embarrassed as I'd just attended the wedding of one of my guests 2 weeks before and it had been really lavish (but everything had gone wrong for them, wedding car broke down, photographer didnt' show etc so although hugely expensive 50K 25 years ago not much fun for them, though we had good food /wine)
I ended up having a posh buffet at home (cold meats,hot veggie pies variety of salads, breads, cheeses, cakes, fruit, wine / beer/ whisky)
She said she'd liked it so much more than her £100 a plate meal 2 weeks before. I think she was just being kind though!

@IceLace100 it was more cringe for the catering company, I was a bridesmaid sat on the top table which is why she noticed. Her dad didn't make a public scene just went into the kitchen to afterwards to ask why they thought that was an acceptable meal at £100 a head. The food looked delicious, it was a small wedding and I was the only dietary requirement so it was very obvious. They messed up for themselves as several friends present where also planning much bigger weddings and mentioned they would've used the catering company as the food was so good but they had several dietary requirements and didn't trust them not to mess it up.