Food Fancy

Sara's fiancé comes to the rescue when the wedding planning, and caterer-finding, finally takes its toll.

by Sara Cardace

Progress! I'm happy to report that I've successfully gotten the ball rolling on the catering front. Fiancé John offered to pitch in when he started to suspect I might lose my mind over the whole thing. Just in time.

I started out by giving him a list of four caterers about whom I'd heard good things and who seemed like they'd be able to work with our vision and budget: The Raging Skillet, Seasons Distinctive Catering, and Real Food Catering. I also asked him to get in touch with Flavor NYC, the catering arm of an uptown restaurant called Bistro Ten 18 that I remember liking from my college days.

Real Food turned out to be booked for the date of our wedding, so we took them off the list. The other three are still in the running though, and I am tentatively hopeful! We've got a tasting set up with Flavor this Friday and another on the calendar for Raging Skillet in early August. The guys at Seasons asked us to give them a better idea of what we're looking for before proceeding to the next step (a good idea, now that I think of it).

Here's what I sent the guys at Seasons:

"We are envisioning a lot of passed hors d'oeuvres--they don't have to be made with particularly fancy ingredients, but we'd like them to be fun and a bit surprising. The flavor is the most important thing. We love the idea of mini-sliders, lobster rolls, banh mi, things like that. No food restrictions, except that we need to have a few heart-healthy options and one vegetarian offering. We like the idea of out-of-the-ordinary stations as well.

For dinner, we'd like to do a buffet that includes some sort of beef option, but we're thinking of avoiding prime rib or filet. Maybe a hanger steak or something similar? And we're thinking about a pasta station to take care of the vegetarians (though we're not set on that by any means).

Other random foods/flavors we love: sweet potatoes, spaetzle, caviar, inventive salads, suckling pig, barbecue (pretty much anything!), soft-shell crab, roasted cauliflower, polenta, duck, chorizo, bacon, green chiles, soup dumplings, oysters (grilled, fried, or otherwise), triple-crème cheese...we're big foodies, so we'll pretty much try anything once! We've never really had an ethnic food we didn't like."

Doesn't that all sound delicious? I'm getting hungry just thinking about it, and I can't wait to see what they come up with....

Oh, and for those of you who are just tuning in, there's a lively discussion going on in the comments section of my wedding-dress post. The more the merrier, so please have a look and let me know what you think!