What’s your strangest ‘wedding food’ related story

[CosyMosy]

Sorry, rubbish title! I was chatting today with a colleague about a wedding I went to last year. The wedding was at the church at 12pm and we were invited to a country club for the reception. We turned up at 1 to find the buffet laid out but not open. We were told it wasn’t opening till 4!! Everyone was starving and the only thing behind the bar was out of date crisps (that the bar was selling for 10pm cheaper because of 😅). When the buffet eventually opened at 4, the bride announced over the mic that we needed to make sure we only took 1 small plate each because it had to last for the night guests as well 😵‍💫. The takeaway down the road made a roaring trade that night

My colleague told me she once went to the wedding of her DH’s colleague, when they sat down for the wedding breakfast half the table were given menus with prices on. When they queried this, it turns out the bride and groom had made the decision to only pay for HALF of the guests meals and the other half were to order and pay for their own meal at the bar!

Something about weddings brings out the worst in people!

Not a wedding but a friend's mum's funeral. I'm diabetic but made assumptions.

Church service was at 11am, crematorium at 1pm. Drove to venue for the funeral tea by 3pm. Food was covered. At 4.15 it was uncovered but I had had 3-4 extra sugary teas to try and stave off hypo approaching sensations.
Never assume food timetables at events!

My mum was invited to a Spanish wedding that took place in Scotland. The 'cake' was effectively a cheese mountain, served with a mountain of fruit. She raved about it for months afterwards and still remembers it fondly.

I'm assuming there was also bread, salad and bits because cheese on it's own isn't really a meal.

Depends how much you like cheese...

I've been to a wedding where all the food with dietary requirements was served to the bride and not the guests with allergies/intolerance. Because her name had been at the top of the email sending them to the venue it was assumed they were all her meal adjustments. As a result no provision had been made for the guests who needed special plates. Totally ruined that part of the day and obviously a great deal of awkwardness all round. I heard they got a hefty refund.

I think I may have been to the same wedding. There was no bread, just a few crackers. When I say a few, it would have amounted to half a Ritz cracker per person present.

Oh I so wish I had tried that at my wedding - I know where I would have been told to go!!!! 😂

I once attended a wedding where the celebrations were in the back room of a pub, everyone had to queue up for their food and it was like (and I'm really showing my Irishness and age here) what we were served in a nightclub as a 'substantial meal' when the lights used to go on. The napkins were single-ply and were close to that tracing paper type toilet paper you may be familiar with if you went to school in Ireland in the 1970's and early 1980's!

It got messy at that wedding and I'm surprised that there weren't more slips, trips or falls from the sauce getting spilled on the floor.

For those who might need that bit explained to them - as part of the licensing laws around alcohol and nightclubs in Ireland in the 1980's and 90's, if the establishment wanted a late license, they had to offer patrons a 'substantial meal' to be allowed remain open after a certain time in the evening. Patrons were given a raffle ticket which they then exchanged for food at a point in the evening. This usually equated to a bowl of soup & a bread roll/chicken curry and rice or beef curry and rice (and most of the curry was sauce and not so heavy on the actual meat in there).

@TheTheBirdintheCave I also attended a wedding with separate "men's" and "women's" menus - not impressed when us women were served something dainty and rubbish whilst the men got a BBQ and we all shared the men's desserts.

When do you expect to find out. I don't think I've ever known what was on the menu until the day.

If I ask then they would probably tell me but I've only ever asked the bride when I've been a bridesmaid as I've asked about the tasting. i don't know why else you would ask.

I've started to decline more and more wedding invites. I've been to so many and I don't like drinking for the sake of it anymore, I also don't like being told when I can and can't eat and I really, really don't like making small talk with my 'rented friends' for the day who I've never met and will never see again, yet get stuck talking to or even sitting on the same table as them. My rule of thumb is unless we know enough people where our table is almost definitely going to be familiar faces, for us both, then we don't go.

Also I know to take a bigger bag with water, comfy shoes, snacks and layers. Just tuck the bigger bag in corner somewhere of ceremony behind a chair, and at the reception in the cloakroom. Saved me many times.

It's also the money - outfit, gift, babysitters of kids aren't invited and they rarely are, travel, sometimes hotel, taxis. I'd rather spend £300 on something else.

@AnnaBegins I would have rioted 😱 At least ours was the same kind of food. No way would I have watched my husband eat a BBQ without me 😂

When I worked in Athens in 1970 , men and women always had different food, and they stood in single sex groups at either end of the room ( my boss was thought to be very odd and ‘European ‘ as we all had the same meal).

When ds1 got married, they had a choice of two options for each of the starter, main and dessert, and we were all asked to choose ahead of time - so that is how we knew what was on the menu.

I wouldn’t expect to know what was going to be on a buffet, though.

I went to an over-cheesed wedding as well.

Marquee in somebody's huge back garden in the middle of nowhere. Bitterly cold. We were evening guests only. Unfortunately when we arrived we found that the meal and speeches had MASSIVELY overrun. The day guests were still having dessert, so they delayed setting out the evening buffet until several hours later than expected (OK, the day guests probably didn't feel like eating again yet, but the evening guests were starving!).

Apart from one ginormous whole Stilton cheese. For some reason, this was set out on a side table about half an hour after we arrived. Nothing else at all: not a single cracker or stick of French bread. In the end us evening guests were so hungry that we just resorted to sawing off great lumps of Stilton and eating them, because there was nothing else for many hours.

We'd travelled for quite a long way, and I'd not been expecting to spend my evening gnawing at lumps of Stilton in the cold.

One minor thing that pissed me off at my own wedding was that I chose the menu.

On the day, the waitress asked which order I'd chosen and I said the brie wellington, and she replied "one vegetarian, ok" - I'm not vegetarian! I ordered it because I knew it was the best thing on the menu!

The other thing was that they served all the coffee with milk. Not a lot of milk - enough that everyone who was dairy free or preferred it black had to ask for black coffee separately (to a great palaver) and everyone else had to add more milk.

Why add any milk in the first place if you're serving it too?!?

😂😂😂 Proper LOLing at this!

Worst one was a hog roast buffet. Fine in theory but the reality was cermony at 11am. Had to be at the church by 10.30.

After the ceremony, photos were taken in the church grounds then we headed to the reception. There was a pay bar (not yet open).

The bride and groom and a select few of their wedding party pissed off for photos on the beach and arrived at the reception at 2.30. Buffet finally opened around 3.15 and called one table up at a time, we were last so left with a dried out roll, some pork fat and no sides!

The best was a wedding which started at 3pm. By 4pm everyone was sat down eating a three course meal which was plentiful and delicious. At 7.30 an evening buffet was brought out.

Destination weddings are another one. Only been to one where we stayed at the venue and they had a multi day affair. The B&G bit off far more than they could chew.

Dinner Friday night on the grounds was amazing, breakfast Saturday came with the room we had paid for, all going well until it didn't. Lunch came and went, where is the food. No one has thought about it. Hot country so wedding didn't start until 4pm.

It was a 'dry hire' venue so they had no food, literally just breakfast which they claimed had nothing left. Caterers were on site but only had supplies for the wedding itself.

Come 2pm some ushers went out to supermarket and brought back baguette, crisps etc, however as you can imagine, by that point people were ravenous, so from what I hear some went overboard but ultimately there wasn't enough food. By the time I went down, there was a handful of crisps. That's your lot.

Shame really as the canapés and grazing table they had at the drink reception were plentiful, just too late.

They also shelled out for a pool party/bbq the next day and had the full works/professionals come in to run it. No expense spared but honestly they left the entire wedding party starving and zero option to get food.

At the other extreme, I remember going to another wedding, also in the early 1980s, at which the food was extremely rich and plentiful. My siblings and I (I was about 20 and they were teenagers) had never seen so much food. We were in heaven and absolutely stuffed ourselves from the buffet, especially with puddings. After what a very short time, a second buffet came out. We overate disgracefully and were all sick on the way home!

This was like my wedding!

I was so paranoid about there not being enough food (after half the guests left my sister’s wedding early because the food ran out and they literally got nothing to eat all day), that we massively over catered.

We had a buffet on arrival at the venue at 1:30, then a 3 course meal at dinner time and then hot sandwiches and chips at 9pm. Plus we had a table full of wedding cakes, chocolates, cake pops, muffins etc. Like a trestle table full for everyone to help themselves to.

There was so much food that people were taking it home, kids were sick from cake, the photographer decided to stay and have a full dinner, the venue staff took boxes home and we genuinely couldn’t get rid of the volume of cake… we were eating it for weeks, handing it out at work, giving it to family and all sorts.

On top of that I’d given a box of fancy chocolates as a wedding favour for every guest and at least 50% of people left them behind- we were eating them for months!

You're traditionally supposed to save some for the first christening!

We went to a colleague's wedding. Her family had snobbish pretensions so the venue for the breakfast was a marquee in the garden with a well known locally chef's mobile catering company doing the food. When it came out, the starters were delicate fronds of food doused in balsamic and arranged like works of art. The main course was similarly presented with 5 very very tiny roast potatoes - enough for a 2 year old.

We were workers were consigned to the back end of the marquee, along with the rough and ready Irish farmers side of the family.
We all got on like a house on fire, the main topic being lack of sustenance and the fact that the entire 200+ wedding party had been fed on a single leg of lamb, and that a decent bowl of soup would have been a perfect starter.

One of my pet hates is standing around for hours with nothing to eat or drink while bride and groom get photoed. I know it's their day, but we are their guests and should be treated better. The second pet hate is stingy/not very nice food when it's clear that a lot of money has been spent on other (to my mind) inessentials. And the third is only having a cash bar. That is completely fine in itself, but it should be made clear on the invitation. All 3 of these pet hates came together in the wedding of a college friend many years ago, which was also in the middle of nowhere and our friend wasn't coming to pick us up for hours and hours. The bride had slept with at least two of us (both women) and was now being very heterosexual indeed. I definitely wondered whether I should make some serious trouble, but restrained myself.