Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I'm weird in that I think you should make as much trouble for your wedding as your 16th birthday or a going away party. What's unusual these days is the absence of a chocolate fondue fountain, bridesmaids wearing a color other than black, and a lack of pretension.

My parents got married in church in the morning, served a fancy breakfast in my grandmother's garden, all the guests left by 1PM, and the couple were at the airport for their honeymoon later that afternoon.

You could also do a tea party with sandwiches, scones, champagne and wedding cake.

With dinner, people expect a variety of wine and alcohol, at least three courses, entrees for vegetarians, non red meat eaters, etc... It's easy to let it go out of control.

I like your idea of a pig roast and pies. For my wedding there was ossobucco and saffron rissoto, a salad and cake. Only family members and close friends attended.

Recently, some friends got married at City Hall and took eight of us to lunch at an elegant French restaurant afterwards that had a nice $28 prix fixe deal. Some of us chipped in for champagne. The waiters brought us some extra dessert. It was very pleasant and stress-free for the guests, and, I think, the couple, and there was no gouging on the part of the restaurant.

When I was young (12 or 13), some distant cousin of my dad's (chinese wedding, invite everyone possible, show off how successful you are...) had her wedding at the Harvard Club in NY. Oh man. Everything was just over the top...
Being young and unexperienced with this whole thing I was not expecting how much food there would be.
Cocktail hour with a raw bar and tons of hors d'oeuvres and drinks (non for me, of course) I had some cousins who were rather young (and overeaters) and it was a little crazy.
By the time dinner rolled around, we werent even hungry any more, and of course we encountered like... 5 forks and 6 cups/glasses. It was rather overwhelming. I don't remember too many things about the dinner menu. I believe there were endives (i did not like them), asparagus, filet mignon..... I'm drawing a blank. They also offered a kids menu and the waiters gave us the option. I distinctly remember by 12 year old cousin, seeing the filet, opted for adult menu but referred to it as "meatloaf"
oh.. and wonderfully, my sister got extremely sick from the one raw oyster she ate.
fun times.
In my family, this is the example we cite for "excessive wedding we don't ever want to host"

Growing up Italian-American-Bostonian, I've been to my share of horrible, gaudy weddings with dry chicken parm buffets and Asti Spumanti instead of champagne.

First and foremost, the food is as important as the dress. I'd rather have 30 people and have a fabulous meal than 230 and a crappy one. My mother was telling me recently about all the nice old fashioned weddings she used to go to - i.e. brunch, in the bride's parents' living room, like my grandparents'. Still, my fiance and I decided to stick with Italian, but we're going to get married in Sicily, so there are no mistakes with the food!

As long as it's good, I think hors d'ouevres would be okay, as long as it wasn't at dinner time and the guests were warned. It's a wedding, not a cocktail party!

I'll second you on the pig roast Meg! Now that will be a party!

I wasn't wild about the food at my wedding. I got married at a supper club and I'd had the food there before and enjoyed it but I found that the wedding food served was mostly meh. We had a cocktail hour with shirmp, chicken satay, brie tartlets and parmesan crips with goat cheese. For dinner there was salad, and then chicken with mushroom cream sauce.

However as much as I swore up and down that I would be the rare bride who actually eats, when it got down to it I was just way to keyed up to eat more than a few bites of food here there. I remember the staff gave us crab cakes but I told them I didn't eat seafood so they gave me some plain crackers (major wtf) and I think I ate the salad and a few bites of the chicken.

Buffets can be super dangerous in large crowds. One of my cousins had a single buffet for table for 300+ people. We were served table by table so of course some tables were nearly finished when my table got their turn and there was a long line behind me! One of my other cousins cut in line and we shot him plenty of eye daggers.

When I got married we had chicken, cedar plank salmon with a port demi glaze, veggie au gratin, rice pilaf, corn salad, asparagus with some sort of sauce (can't remember), mixed grean salad, and rolls. The pre dinner was the normal finger foods passed around. i had a multi tiered cake but requested fresh flowers on the top rather then the dorky dolls lol. Punch for the kids, coffee, tea, a champagne fountain, wine and beer and a very expensive bottle of bubble just for my hubby (now my ex) and myself. It was sit down and everyone got served accordingly thank God.

The worst wedding that i had been to was:
A childhood friend of mine who has 14 brother's and sisters and his bride has 7 siblings got married. First off the ceremony was hell, it was 95 degrees out and the little church was filled to the brim with people and no air conditioning, they snuck a mass in so we were all there for about 1 1/2 hours. At the reception they had two lines for the buffet and both lines were long and they ran out of food. Didn't get jack, many didn't. But worse then anything it was a dry reception as well. We snuck out and left early and went to the nearest bar lol.

@Ortolan--I love that attitude! I wish more people shared it. In my experience, the food, no matter how good, is hardly noticeable given the stress of the event. Usually the band and people who don't know the couple very well, and thus care very little how the event transpires eat the most. I find the idea of going to a wedding very aggressively expecting to be 'fed' rather odd, perhaps--but I also find the idea of spending zillions of dollars on an event the bride and groom often don't enjoy strange as well.

At my cousin's wedding, I was served a fabulous eggplant and couscous meal that I would normally have loved--had it not been 11pm at night, and I knew I had a 2 hour drive ahead of me to get home. I nearly fell asleep in my couscous and was too tired to take more than a bite.

We had a buffet, but a more formal buffet. I posted this recently, but we had strips or sirloin served over roasted tomatoes filled with horseradish cream, fillet of salmon served with peppers, plates of cold smoked seafood, and broccoli and stilton tartlets. There were salt-crusted mini-baked potatoes, mozzarella and tomato salad, green salad, and asparagus with balsamic vinaigrette. We didn't have a normal cake, either...we had a croquembouche, which is a pyramid of profiteroles coated in caramel, which we served with chocolate and raspberry sauces, alongside a berry cheesecake and a tray of local cheeses with biscuits and fresh bread. We also had a chip cart come around ten, doling out bacon sandwiches and chips to our guests.

We loved it. And that's all that matters. It's your day and not anyone else's. Don't forget that.

Everyone seems to hate buffets, but I'm Indian-American and the only way to serve Indian food is buffet style! It's way too complicated to try to do an Indian plated dinner--you could maybe do family style, but some Indian vegetarians aren't fans of meat being near their food.

I'm getting married next Saturday and we are doing buffet, with a meat carving station (Leg of lamb with ginger, garlic, spices, nuts). We have Chef Raghavan Iyer and he is making some amazing food. I would paste all the descriptions, but it would get too long!

@xwafflesx: I don't like cake either! We're having mango-cardamom cheesecake with a pistachio crust. And Indian sweets. Yummm.

I learned a serious lesson on what NOT to do at my reception one day based on what one of my dear friends did at hers. Her wedding was at 5pm, so naturally the reception started around 6ish....which is dinnertime, people. If you're going to have a reception at dinnertime, you MUST serve dinner. (Or at least somehow warn people on the invitation that dinner is not being served, so that they can plan accordingly.) Anyway, I would have been glad for a buffet at that point - I was a bridesmaid and therefore had spent the better part of the day helping the bride, and not eating anything myself - or a few platters of hors d'oeuvres. However, none of those were to be found anywere. Rather, what did we have? Cake. And there were a few bowls of mixed nuts and those pastel-colored mints here and there. That's it. At dinnertime. And the cake wasn't even particularly good. My father (who was a guest) left the reception early just he could go get dinner. I, on the other hand, had to stay...and starve. I honestly don't know what the bride (or anyone else who planned the wedding) was thinking.

Best reception I ever went to was one where the bride had not only graduated from culinary school, but also had amazing taste in everything anyway - definitely a good combo. Hers actually was a buffet, but the food was excellent and the presentation was beautiful. And the cake was, by far, the best wedding cake I've ever had. It was two layers of chocolate cake with a ganache filling, and two layers of lemon cake with a raspberry filling. The bride, knowing what I foodie (and chocoholic) I am specifically pulled me aside to tell me to get the chocolate cake and then report back to her with my critique....which I am happy to say was nothing but positive.

I love indian buffets! I don't really hate buffets in general but they can be just need to be executed properly, i don't think it's fun to make people wait half an hour to eat while the birdal party's already finished dinner.

I agree with all the people above who pointed out that it's not only what you serve that's important, it's when you serve it. One couple I know got married in the late afternoon, so the reception was scheduled to start right around dinnertime (6 pm). We waited and waited for appetizers. They were finally brought out, but they ran out pretty quickly. We then waited for a few hours to be told to be seated (it was a sit-down dinner, but the appetizers were passed, to allow the guests to mingle). We sat down, excited for the dinner we thought was coming, but no: There were about 6 speeches, a slideshow, on and on. By the time I ate, I didn't even care anymore...I was too busy concentrating on not passing out!