A stupid question about wedding breakfast/buffet

[whackamole]

We have found a restaurant we think might be suitable for our wedding breakfast. They do a proper sit down meal for £29.99 a head, or various buffets ranging from £9.50-£16 per head.

We are planning to go there for a meal to scope out the actual restaurant as we have never been, just been recommended by a friend, is this what you do? If it's not suitable should we do this with any venue we like the look of, or just assume what we choose would be fine? This place is an independent place, but assuming if we chose somewhere like MalMaison then this wouldn't be necessary as they are a well-known name etc etc.

Also, in your opinion, if you were having a small (think 30 guests max, at least 5 of whom will be children) would you prefer a sit-down dinner (starting at 2pm) or a less formal buffet? We are not having an evening do, this will be it.

I'm so clueless, but OH is worse!

For just 30 I would do a sit down meal if I could afford it.

Sit down meal is great with that number

We had small numbers and had a buffet. It worked quite well as mostly everyone could reach the food at the same time without queuing and then just mingled around (30 people), I'm not a fan of sit down meals but as above with small numbers a sit down is quick and easy to serve so no waiting around !!

We had 32 incl us, 8 of which were kids. Sit down meal went really well and they only charged us £15 for the kids, it was £95 for the adults.

There were 28 of us, 4 of whom were children.

We had an independent restaurant. They had a part of the restaurant which wasn't a room on it's own, but because of it's location it seemed set apart (slightly) from the rest of the restaurant. We then got the feeling of being on our own, but having the ambience of the restaurant IYSWIM.

We had two courses and were allowed to take our cake in and serve it as pudding (making it three courses in all).

Our guests chose whatever they wanted from the lunchtime menu (such as prawn or pate starters followed by lamb shank with rosemary mash or piri piri chicken) there was a total of 28 options so plenty to chose from an something for everyone (posh fish and chips for the kids), which gave varying costs on the bill.

We scouted out the restaurant first, as we didn't know it, having never been there before. Found out (after we'd eaten) it was one of the top restaurants in town. They were really fabulous. Very discrete (we wanted informal) and good at suggesting things.

Total cost, including all drinks (loads of wine, beer and soft drinks) was £985.

I'd do it all again exactly the same way - a great day, made even greater by the food. Which I believe comes down to being cooked by a proper chef, not someone in a hotel kitchen just churning out mediocre meals for people who will probably never eat there again so therefore the 'chef' doesn't really care.