I’ve said before that there are three main areas of wedding planning in which the typical groom is eager to be involved: food, booze, and music. Some brides think that their groom must surely be interested in his own outfit as well, but since a rented tux isn’t (a) edible or (b) able to be drunk out of a glass, it lags well behind the other areas.
With that in mind, let’s talk food. Specifically, let’s talk hors d’oeuvres. Hors d’oeuvres tend to take a back seat to the dinner (or lunch) and with good reason. Not only is the meal the bulk of the food cost, but the words “hors d’oeuvres” are also really hard to spell and that scares a lot of people away.
But hors d’oeuvres have a very special place in the reception. Why? Because your guests will lie to you. They will tell you that hors d’oeuvres aren’t important, when, in fact, it matters deeply to them. And the reason it matters deeply is because most weddings fall into one of two categories:
Category 1: Not Enough Hors d’Oeuvres. This is the most common and problematic category. Your guests have calmly sat through a wedding ceremony in which you had readings of ten different poems about how your love is like the ocean and/or snowfall, and now that it’s over, they’re ready to reward themselves with several dozen pigs-in-blankets.
Only there’s a problem: not enough pigs-in-blankets. Those that you did order are consumed before half the guests even make it to the cocktail hour. Which means that everyone starts gathering around the kitchen, waiting with bated breath for a waiter to emerge with a tray of...well, anything. The people standing far away from the kitchen don’t ever get food, which means by the reception they’re drunk, and wander out onto the dance floor during the father-daughter dance and start giving you and your dad creepy hugs. Not good.
Category 2: Too Many Hors d’Oeuvres. Occasionally, a bride and groom will have just returned from a wedding that didn’t have enough hors d’oeuvres and so they’ll go crazy. Raw bar! Pasta bar! Crepe station! 35,000 pigs-in-blankets. The truth is that there isn’t really a problem with too many hors d’oeuvres. Your guests will be happy and will still eat their dinner, because when you’re paying, they’re eating until they pop. The only problem, in fact, is that it sets the bar way too high. Once you go to a reception with crazy hors d’oeuvres, it’s hard to go back. Except, of course, when you’re paying.
The good news is that there are some easy fixes that can be implemented that help you stay out of category 1, while avoiding the cost of category 2.
Step 1: The Station Agent You don’t need to have a raw bar, a carving station, and a dim sum cart. But you do need to have at least one table with snacks on it. Cheese, veggies, chips and salsa, nuts – whatever. If you just have passed hors d’oeuvres, it will never be enough. For some reason, all humans have a bottomless pit in their stomach when it comes to eating crab cakes off a tray. But we pace ourselves better when we know there is table we can go if we get hungry before the next waiter passes by.
Step 2: Go With Quantity over Variety A little cracker with warm goat cheese on it will almost always be cheaper than lamb lollipops. (That term which always make squeamish, by the way. It’s like saying you’re serving chicken ice cream or veal pudding.) The fact is that you’re going to need a greater quantity of hors d’oeuvres than you could ever imagine, so don’t be afraid to load up on the cheapest ones. Your guests would rather have three or four choices that are readily available than eight to ten choices which are all gone
Step 3: Keep it Quick If you want people to focus on dinner, then move things along. The longer your cocktail “hour” the more snacks your guests will need. If the hour is more like forty-five minutes, no one will notice. There’s still time to schmooze (and get drunk) after dinner.
And if all this talk of spending money on hors d’oeuvres is stressing you out, remember this: your guests’ love of you exceeds their love of hors d’oeuvres. Slightly.
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