Venue choices and food tasting

Ask someone you trust to do a tasting? I cannot imagine booking a venue without trying the food.

Most venues actually don't just give you a tasting before booking. Many only have a formal tasting for when you are selecting your wedding menu. I personally needed to taste the food before booking and went to the showcases of our top 2 venues (which would be tricky being out of state since they are on randomly selected dates) ans tasted some of the food there. You could probably send someone to the showcase to try the food in your place!

I am also planning my NY wedding from a distance. We choose the venue, and our venue did not include catering. This worked better for us because we were able to select the venue and then go back up a month or two after and do food tasting with local catering companies. It’s a little bit more of a hassle but you get the food that you love!

Our venue was my venue, no matter what.. but they also allow outside catering, but do give a discount fi you use their in house. However, if the venue required to use their catering, I would not book without tasting.

As PP said most venues don’t let you taste before. Look at online reviews and trust your gut. Also look to see if they host large open houses there are usually tastings and tours during those times.

Also NY/NJ is like the wedding capital of the US so I would hop on this now, especially if a trusted family member can start looking in person for you and narrow it down. This should not be a casual search.

View Quoted Comment I know! Thats part of my concern. I’m getting married July 2019 so I want to take care of the venue ASAP before the good places are all unavailable. I’m hoping to make my decision no later than the end of April but preferably by mid April just to be safe

Our venue gave us a list of preferred caterers and stated that we could pick anyone we wished. I am currently looking for caterers and only have found one that allowed for a tasting before we signed the contract.

We were planning on traveling for our wedding anyway so we knew it would be difficult to schedule things like that. The venue we eventually chose has an exclusive caterer that we couldn't taste test prior so I checked online reviews to make sure the food was raved about online as much as the coordinator raved. If you're able to taste test prior, either plan for that or have a close friend/family member you trust try it out and report back to you. But make sure you check ALL reviews, not just on WW. Some businesses have google reviews, Yelp reviews, Facebook reviews, random website reviews, etc. so make sure you do all your homework.