Categories: Weddings

How to Save on the Cost of Your Wedding Reception Food

The food at your wedding reception can turn out to be one of the most expensive things in your wedding. With cost’s typically ranging from $5 to even $100 dollars a head and sometimes even more you need to know where to look if you want to plan your wedding on a budget.

When I got married the place we were married at, English Garden’s in Winter Park Florida gave us two options when it came to the food, we could pay between $25 and $65 a head or we could cater the event ourselves through another party. We would have basically had orderves or semi-fancy food for those prices.

We immediately thought of a solution to our after party budget problem. We asked our friend Dom who runs Dom’s Pizza in Orlando to do the catering. We have known Dom for a long time and it was also Dom’s Pizza that my friends and I would go to to just talk after a day of work. It’s also where I finally met my husband Mike, so we thought what better way to save money on the party while making our friends happy with eating stuff they are use to eating anyways. We got a great deal through Dom at $6 a head plus a tip for each person he sent over to cater the event. Having Pizza, Pasta, Calzones, Chicken Fingers, Hot Wings and Stuffed Hippie Rolls at the event was a great change from the traditional wedding party meal and left everyone very happy and pleased with an all you can eat buffet.

With the right set up of the buffet it can look like you spent a ton of money catering the event with out loosing your wallet to the caterers. People were asking me if we spent a fortune on the catering and were really surprised when I said it was only $6 a head for everyone plus Dom threw in extra food at no cost.

This was the first time Dom had ever catered a wedding before and actually encouraged him to try his hand at that line of business after our wedding. He did a pretty good job at it too. But this is just one example of how to save money on the after party at your wedding. We had only anticipated 65 people showing up and ended up with 80 people total. So the extra stuff Dom sent over helped tremendously and allowed people to take home food from the wedding instead of throwing it out afterwards. And the place we were married at only caters for the amount of people you initially tell them are going to be there, so we would have had a problem if we had gone with them in the first place. We also saved over $1000 in food that we didn’t have when we got married.

Aligning yourself with a local restaurant or even a friend who owns or works for a local restaurant is a good way to save on costs. You should plan on talking to them about how many people you will have coming to your event and how much extra you want to pay for in case you find yourself with 15 extra people at the wedding like we did. You can probably negotiate depending on the amount of people coming a cost at less then $10 a head. You may also be able to get them to cater the drinks part of the after party. We had to go through English Gardens for that because Dom didn’t have the proper license to serve off property but with the money we saved using him we were able to handle that cost.

For any future bride or groom trying to figure out what to do about the food part of the wedding, try and get an idea of what your guests are going to like. When we told all our friends we were using Dom’s as the caterer they were really excited, so that left us with asking our families and other friends not familiar with Dom’s if they would be ok with the selection of food we wanted to go with. We were really happy when they said it would be fine.

You will hopefully only get one chance at your big day, so remember to go with something affordable and enjoyable when it comes to your reception food. Remember the day is all about you and what will make you happy. And remember cutting costs but still having something to show for it is the best way to go always.