Your wedding is the celebration of one of the most exciting moments in your life as a couple, but not a huge food speed eating contest. It’s not a royal reception either.
Everything has to look really nice, but it doesn’t mean that it should be unbelievably expensive.
You can totally organize a wonderful and entertaining wedding reception and keep your guests’ tummies satisfied if you’re on a budget.
You’ll have to work on your wedding menu with creativity to pull out unexpected wedding food ideas, find the ways to transform quite common dishes into the wedding-worth foods and find the caterer who’ll agree to embody your ideas.
But, in the end of the day, you’ll appear with amazingly planned and delicious wedding dinner and buffet without breaking your budget.
Here’re a few reception food ideas on a budget that will help you achieve that.
Wedding reception food ideas on a budget
- The wisest thing to do when you have a restricted wedding menu budget is to organize a sit-down wedding dinner with 2 options of main course (meat and fish ones) and sides and one-two kinds of salads.
Appetizers and other little buffet snacks should be presented gradually throughout the evening. - For instance, you may fuel up your hungry guests with filling appetizers (like burger bites, salads or mac and cheese in baby pots, meatball, veg and fruit snacks on toothpicks, etc.) once they arrive to the venue to make them last to the actual dinner.
Once the latter is over, roll out your buffet table. - Some people argue that it’s best to provide heavy appetizers, desserts and snacks and go without the sit-down dinner.
But, that will make you prepare/order a huge variety of those foods.
And, that might turn out more expensive than presenting the traditional wedding menu and making the dishes/snacks available according to the schedule. - Talk to your caterer and discuss the prices of buffet and plated meals.
Don’t go overboard with the choices, especially if you’ve already planned a full-blown dinner that’s supposed to be the guest’s main fill-up. - Opt for the meals that include seasonal ingredients. This saves quite unexpected amount of money.
- Cook your appetizers at home. Those are the foods you may actually prepare beforehand.
Store them in your fridge/freezer. Find cute plates or other ways to present them. - Salads and different fruit on a stick, deviled eggs, seafood or barbecue chicken dips, tomato and mozzarella stacks, tortilla pin wheals with meat filling, chocolate cookies with sweet cream cheese interlaying will be amazing wedding appetizers.
Visit Moneycrashers.com to see the recipes. - Another brilliant idea that will impress your guests and will keep your appetizer and buffet budget in a good state is setting a DIY food and snack station.
That will give your guests much more choice with the same amount of ingredients. You can do the same thing to the cocktail bar as well. - Dress up your appetizers with the help of dainty ramekins and parsley leaves.
They’ll transform even the most usual comfort food or greek salad into a filling appetizers your hungry guest will appreciate. - Lemonade and cocktail bars are wedding must-haves.
Let your guests improvise by letting them mix their own cocktails out of different syrups and beverages.
Have a couple of recipes printed and displayed on a cute stand to give a couple of tasty options. - Most wedding venues provide their alcohol drinks at enormously huge prices. Don’t let alcohol turn into your biggest reception spending.
Negotiate with your venue to make sure that you can bring your own vine and beer.
Stick to these drinks and avoid liquor if you’re on a budget.
Non-alcoholic mojitos, smoothies and other mocktails will satisfy your guest’s taste, while vine will be a perfect toast drink. - Don’t order a huge cake. No one is going to eat a lot of it anyway.
Moreover, people even get take-me-home boxes to give away the remaining part of the cake not to waste it.
Just stick to a small, but elaborately decorated option
- Dessert side of the buffet may be compiled out of well-decorated cake pops, cupcakes and even doughnuts presented on pretty multileveled stands.
- Dessert mini plates with mini brownies, a couple of supermarket cookies and chocolates are another budget-friendly wedding dessert option.
Don’t forget to implement fruit-based desserts as well. - Outside catering that’s not provided by your venue might be your wedding budget saver.
When you don’t have to stick to your venue’s services, you have much more catering service options to choose from.
That allows you to be more flexible with the wedding food budget and find the caterer who won’t be surprised with your craziest menu ideas.
Go to HireRush.com to post a wedding catering task or call the local caterers directly from the website to discuss their wedding food suggestions that won’t cross the red line of your budget.
