Wedding food: amazing vs mediocre

I had the best filet mignon of my life at a wedding! I’ve also had great lobster and crab at a wedding with a seafood display, and really good prime rib at a wedding with carving stations. The only bad food I’ve had at weddings has always been buffets (especially BBQ buffets). The food has just been very blasé and barely warm. I feel like every couple who’s wedding we went to that had barbecue have all said “I know most wedding BBQ isn’t very good, but ours is awesome!”…. but then it isn’t LOL I’ve actually started wondering if these BBQ places do tastings that are amazing, then don’t deliver that same product on wedding day. Maybe it has something to do with making small batches for a couple people vs huge batches for events. Beyond BBQ, I’ve also had lots of dry boring chicken, pasta that looks like it was just boiled than a jar of Prego dumped on it, and unseasoned vegetables on buffets. It was mostly due to those experiences that we immediately said absolutely no buffet for our wedding! We are having a Destination wedding and have hired a chef to cook local cuisine. We are hoping to give our guests a chance to submerge themselves in local culture and to try different foods that we can’t get where we live.

Made to order handrolls and sushi! At a different wedding, Clams and oysters shucked the spot

The most recent wedding I attended had the worst food by far. It was a country club buffet, and the issue wasn’t it being a buffet the food was all just terrrible. I can best describe it as a 3-star hotel’s late night room service. Salty and dry, everything was just… gross.


The best: mine! Lol. But really, we prioritized food. We worked with a farm-to-table chef, the main course was steak au proivre. Our cake was super yummy also. I really haven’t had that bad of food at weddings other than the one I first described.

I went to a wedding that had squid ink pasta and that was really interesting! i wouldn't say it was amazing though, only that it was interesting.

my bff's wedding food was bad =x like really memorably bad. i mean i mostly try to stick to a plant based diet. so i got her vegetarian dish and it was absolutely HORRID. like people at my table tried my entree and they all made a face and said it was nasty. i mean i didn't try the other meats and stuff but even that the groom said it was "decent" = calling your own food decent is not a good thing haha.

I went to a wedding at a very fancy hotel in Baltimore. For cost, everyone was served chicken as the plated meal. It was absolutely terrible.


One Italian wedding I attended had an absolutely massive cocktail hour with a dozen stations, a five course plated meal, dessert, cake, Viennese hour and a send off snack. I was uncomfortably full by the end of it but it was all incredible!
Probably my favorite individual food from our wedding was the beef Wellington bites at cocktail hour, which were absolutely amazing and a huge hit!

My friend got married last October so it was during covid. Within about 2 months her mom switched the whole thing from a venue to her backyard. I know her mom well so I should’ve gone in expecting she would go above and beyond but I was blown away! The food was delicious and so filling! I LOVED the eggplant Parmesan!

Agree with above that buffet food has always been very so so.

We did filet mignon and a half lobster, with a red wine jus, hasselback potatoes, and roasted asparagus at our wedding two weeks ago and everyone seemed to love it as far as I know.

Also very popular during our cocktail hour was a jamón ibérico cutter who was slicing it directly off the leg for the guests. Probably because it was both fun to watch and delicious to eat lol.

The best wedding food I've had was a few years ago at my friend's wedding, she had AMAZING appetizers and a buffet dinner, but everything was just absolutely delicious. It was all your normal wedding food, but the chefs really did a great job and cared and you could tell because it did NOT taste like the normal mediocre wedding food at all. My favorite thing that night was probably her chicken and waffles appetizer.

The WORST food I had...it makes me kind of sick just thinking about it. We went to a Jewish wedding and everything was served ice cold. I'm talking like, just taken out of the fridge and served to us cold. It was chicken and salmon and it was disgusting. Someone said it was because they were Jewish and it was some kind of tradition, but I know quite a few Jewish people and none of them have ever heard of serving cold food, so I think the place was just bad.

I'm really looking forward to our wedding food because we've done 3 tastings and every time the food is delicious. I'm really excited for our little French Onion soup cups that we are having at cocktail hour, my stepfather said that at his son's wedding (held at our venue), he had like 7 of them.

Sounds like some delicious food eaten here . At our first wedding we had a buffet but I don't remember anybody complaining about it. At our vow renewal however, I would like to do sit down meal and hopefully have some wonderful food.