When we started planning, "what to eat" sounded easy. We both cook. We have opinions. Then we hit the actual decision tree and discovered there are about forty ways to feed sixty people, and we had to narrow it down to one.
The three formats
Plated means a catering team serves each person the same dish, one course at a time. Elegant. Predictable. Looks great in photos. Costs the most. Tastes slightly less home than anything we'd cook ourselves, because nobody is making small adjustments for the one friend who is vegetarian and also hates coriander.
Buffet means a long table of dishes, everyone serves themselves. Cheap, flexible, friendly. Also: a queue, people standing with plates while someone makes a decision, and the eternal problem of the dish at the end of the line being cold by the time people get to it.
Family-style means big dishes in the middle of each table, passed around. It's the one we picked, and I'll explain why in a second.
Why family-style
We want our friends to talk to each other at dinner, not to a waiter.
That's the whole reason. Family-style forces a table conversation. Someone has to ask "can you pass the bread," someone else has to say "try the carrots, they're better than they look," and suddenly you're ten minutes into a conversation you wouldn't have had if you were both facing the same direction eating the same plated course.
Who's cooking
This is the part where our friends volunteered. Three of them are good cooks. One of them has a catering oven in their garage that can handle sixty portions of stew. One of them is a sommelier who has opinions about wine pairing. We offered to pay for ingredients and wine; they told us to shut up and pick the menu.
So we picked the menu. It's still in flux. Here's roughly what we're thinking.
- Startersbreads, three dips, a big salad, something with roasted vegetables
- Mainsone stew (meat), one stew (veg), something with fish, a couple of sides, lots of bread
- Dessertthree cakes from friends who've offered, plus a cheese plate if we have room
- Drinkswine, beer, a non-alcoholic option, coffee after
What we're not doing
A three-course plated dinner. A cake-cutting ceremony. A champagne tower. Anything that requires a server to lean over and refill our glasses while we're mid-sentence.
We're doing a long table, full of food our friends made, with people we want to talk to for as long as the evening allows.