Full dinner or heavy hors d'oeuvres?

Full dinner for me

Apps only will be more expensive as you need to plan for people to eat a lot of them. If you're having your wedding at a meal time, you need to serve a full meal.

Apps make people nervous - they constantly have to determine what it is, (is this a spring roll, or is there meat in it?) multiple times, then wonder if they're eating too many...THEN there's the math: how many of these little burgers equal one whole burger? Is my date going to see me eat 10 pigs in a blanket? Do I even care anymore if I'm willing to risk this relationship for number 11 and 12?

Dinner is easier. Go with the dinner.

Definitely dinner

I prefer dinner. You could always multiple stations, that was one of my favorite weddings as a guest (I think there was carving station, pasta station, mashed potato station, bacon station, and one other).

I would prefer a dinner. I feel like hor d'ouevres would be hard to plan because you would want to be sure you have enough food to satisfy everyone but if you do a dinner, at least everyone would get the same thing and it's like that's all they get, lol.

Dinner.

We initially were leaning towards doing heavy apps. I loved the idea of a cocktail style reception. But ultimately, it would drag out "dinner" and cut into dancing and the other receptions stuff. For our 83 guests, it was an hour for our meal vs 2-3 hours of grazing for heavy apps. It also requires a lot more serving staff. To have anything above little smokies and meatballs (NOT what we wanted) was actually going to nearly double our pp cost.

I've seen it done and done well, but in the end for us, a full dinner was a much better option.

Dinner, without a doubt.

Full dinner.

Dinner....I'd be pissed if I attended and got tapas.

Dinner.

Yep. let me sit down to a blob of chicken and a plop of rice. Cause that's exciting.

I love our cocktail party style weddings, but your venue needs to know how to do it right, and they rarely do. It's never less expensive and it's harder to orchestrate.

The average 'cocktail hour" at one of my upscale venues will have four to five action stations and 10-20 passed hors. It's clearly enough for a meal, though a sit down meal usually follows. That 'cocktail hour' could easily be expanded upon to make it fabulous reception. But your venue needs to know how to orchestrate this, and they rarely do.

I'd rather have the hors d'oeuvres reception just because it's different...

Everyone knows cocktail hour is the BEST part of wedding. Mainly because of the food. I love the variety and stations etc. I would love that however your wallet will not. It's much more expensive than a sit down dinner.

Dinner, I’m a hangry person....I also like snacks... sooo... I like hors d’ouevres, and dinner

Full dinner

I'm doing a small plates reception, so some heavy hors d'oeuvres some small portion meal foods. I love hors d'oeuvres, though and am generally much happier with that than most wedding meals. I am also planning for only about 50 guests and a 3.5 hour reception so I wanted maximum mix and mingle time for the guests.

Full dinner

Din Din