Venue doesn't allow tasting before booking

Wow! That is crazy!! Have you seen reviews from any former nuptials?

I’m not familiar with the venue, but I had the same experience with my venue. What we did was schedule the tasting as early as possible, and we had the invitations 99% ready to go before the tasting so all we had to do was put food choices in. We used minted and ended up with plenty of time between the tasting to go through the proof process, printing, delivery, etc, went on vacation for a week (did nothing with the invites) and then spent basically a full day on assembly before we sent them out (earlier today!)

we have a ton of out of town guests, but we sent save the dates and people have already been booking hotel rooms. They will have about 4 weeks to return the rsvps in the mail once they receive them which should be plenty of time (added about a week and a half of buffer time on for follow ups)

I sent save-the-dates, so maybe it will work out if I give the guests a shorter time to reply than I planned, probably 1 month-ish. All the reviews say the food is good, and the restuarant food is good. Just no review says what entree they picked.

My venue gave us a packet with a whole timeline of things to do when to schedule them etc. On that list was the tasting should be 3 to 4 months before the wedding. So that meant around Aug or Sept. I contacted my venue and told them my schedule is very tight, it's hard for me to get off work but I had a week of pre planned vacation time in April and I need to schedule my tasting for that time. And they did! Good luck

My venue has a time line to things as for as food tasting, payments, setting up for picking out a cake etc. You can try to contact them again and see if you can do your food tasting a little earlier because you have to send out your invitations to your guests. Maybe they will give you a little wiggle room once you explain the situation to them.

Maybe you'll get lucky like Michelle and be able to get the venue to do a tasting earlier! Otherwise, I get being stressed about doing it so last minute with wanting to get invites out. I would scour their menu and have at least an idea of what we like and would want, my FH is pretty picky so narrowing down options he would like probably wouldn't be too hard. Is the chef the same for the restaurant? Just because the menu options aren't exactly the same, I would expect the same quality and similar dishes so you could try the restaurant to get an idea. It looks like they have excellent reviews specifically mentioning their great food, I don't think most people include what they got because people have different tastes and menus can change frequently (maybe that's part of why they won't do a tasting earlier, if they have seasonal menus or to prevent issues if they change the menu and no longer offer something that was selected previously). Good luck and happy planning!

We didn’t do our tasting until after our invites went out but we just had people choose from chicken, beef, vegetarian because we knew those were the 3 options we were going to have.

We were all set to sign a contract with a highly rated venue...until we had the tasting. Terrible. Will never ever ever sign before eating the food. Hope your food is delious.

You don’t really need to send the invites out 3 months before anyway. You can have them designed and just add in your meal options and order right after your tasting. Sending them out 2.5-2 months before the wedding is fine. Or do what Kelly did and do generic chicken, beef, veggie and then pick things that fit in that category

I second the idea of saying chicken, beef, or vegetarian. After your tasting, you can put more entree details on your wedding website.

I think if you have your invitea pretty much ready to go and then just add in the meal choices, you will be fine. We sent our invites 7 weeks before we needed rsvps back and it's been fine. We didnt have to do meal choices though. Everyone is getting a dual plate of chicken and beef, unless they specify a dietary need and our venue will substitute a vegetarian, gluten free, nut free etc for those guests.

My venue is the same way. I just looked at reviews online and they also have a reputation in the community as having great food. I don't think it's uncommon to not be able to taste before booking.

I have never heard of people having a tasting before booking a venue. Maybe for caterers I could understand. You typically have to book a venue then the tasting is scheduled at 3-4 months as you said. This is pretty standard. Didn't they give you a food list? You should ask for the menu options and then read reviews. That's all you can do.

The only tasting we did was when we went on a tour we got a few appetizers that they served. Then at an open house they had we had a lot of their different stations and all but tasting is definitely 3-4 months before.

View Quoted Comment A few are by open house only but many in my region are by request. I'm not going to spend thousands of dollars and not know if the food is worth it.

Our venue is like that, in that they don't want to schedule any tastings until about 3 months before. They have some seasonal options, so don't want you tasting food that won't be available on the menu down the road.

But we're doing a buffet, so our guests don't have to choose a meal option with their RSVP, so it works out ok. But even if they did, we wouldn't send out invitations that early anyway.