Diy food at reception- Taco Bar?

Very few if any venues, including the parks department, will allow you to cook your own food in your own kitchen. For safety and liability issues. If you are on a strict budget, your best bet is to go on Google for your area and look up taco catering or ask your favorite local restaurant to make pans of food for them to deliver to your venue. It will be more food with better quality at a lower price. And they have a minimal charge, if any, for plates and cutlery.

So there are a few things you are going to need to think about.
1. Like Michelle mentioned, will your venue allow self-catering? A lot of venues don't. 2. Who is making, serving and cleaning up the food? Your family and friends shouldn't be responsible for this. They are guests so they should be able to relax and not worry about attending to food at your wedding. 3. What all do you plan on serving? I had a taco buffet for my gender reveal and I checked with those attending that they all liked beef tacos/nachos. There were only 13 people in attendance so it wasn't like I had that many people I had to check with plus I knew the answer for most of them. For our gender reveal, we served beef taco meat, Mexican cheese, nacho cheese, sour cream, shredded lettuce, tomatoes, tortilla shells (both hard, soft and taco boats), and tortilla chips. But not everyone likes beef so I would suggest having other options such as pork or chicken. 4. What if someone is a vegan/vegetarian/doesn't like Mexican? Not everyone everyone likes Mexican food so do you have another option for whose who don't or won't really eat anything you are serving because of their dietary restrictions? 5. How are you preparing the food? For my gender reveal, I started the meat extremely early in crockpots. We had two full crockpots of taco meat which was just enough for all 13 of us. Depending on the size of your wedding you will likely need a ton of meat which might be extremely difficult not only to prepare, but also transport and keep warm without drying the meat out. 6. Does your venue have places to keep things cold? You will need a fridge to keep certain things cold like lettuce, sour cream and cheese. They can't just be sitting out for hours. 7. How large is your wedding? If your wedding is large you will need a ton of food. I believe I bought about 5 pounds of ground beef for the gender reveal and that only served 13 people. Plus multiples of all of the other ingredients.

Your venue sounds lovely. How many people will you be having? Taco bars are a lot of fun but they can be a lot of work. We had a fun dinner party recently that was a taco bar but it was pretty small. We had ground beef, ground turkey, and Boca crumbles (for the vegetarians), there were hard shell tacos, soft shell tacos, spinach salad (if anyone wanted to make a taco salad) tomato, onions, cheese, vegan cheeses, sour cream, shredded lettuce, a variety of salsas, gauc, chips, black beans, and yellow rice as the side. Margaritas and homemade cinnamon ice cream were also on the menu, it was delicious but a lot of work and a lot of clean up. We kept the meat warm in a buffet server, its electric so there needs to be an outlet nearby. Good luck!

View Quoted Comment Ours said they’d allow it already.

How many people are you serving? Self-catering does present challenges and complications as others have outlined. Of particular importance is keeping food at food safe temperatures at all times, to prevent making your guests sick. Caterers have professional sized equipment and training to be able to assure this. I would very much recommend hiring something like a food truck for safety reasons, unless your group is quite small.

My close friend just did something like this for her wedding. Look into food trucks. They will save you a lot of money, they have a food handling license, and you can set it up buffet style no problem. 🥰