This is the third in my weekly series on budget event planning. Today, here are my thoughts on keeping catering costs in bounds.
Appetizing food doesn't have to break the bank. Photo courtesy of christytylerphotography.com.
After the location, food is probably your largest event cost. And many caterers will try to make sure that you spend at least half of your total budget on food. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. There are many ways you can keep your food and drink costs under control and still have a festive and hospitable event. We’ll look at food today and next week, and look at beverages in a future post.
Consider Day and Time
The easiest way to control costs is to consider time of day. Breakfast, brunch, and lunch are generally less expensive meals than dinner. I believe that this is as much a matter of social convention as of intrinsic cost, but you can still take advantage of it. A late morning or early afternoon wedding can be followed by lunch. An anniversary celebration can be a brunch party. For the early risers among us, breakfast celebrations are unusual and offer great menu options.
Depending on your event, you might also choose not to serve a full meal, but to limit your food service to snacks. (Miss Manners says, though, that if you’re keeping people at your event at meal time, be sure to feed them.) Be careful, though: Many caterers will give you the same price for heavy hors d’oeuvres as for a full meal. But a traditional morning wedding used to be followed by punch and cake. You can use or elaborate on this tradition to have a nice, inexpensive party.
Choose Your Caterer Carefully
This leads me to my second easy way to control food costs, and that is your choice of caterer. In Chicago, there are the big downtown caterers and then there are the smaller outfits. The big ones are on the preferred vendor list of every venue in the city. Fortunately, some of the smaller ones have made it onto the lists of various venues, as well. If you can’t figure out with a little internet research which caterer falls into which category, ask an event professional. Personally, I have dealt with enough of each kind of caterer to know one from the other. The smaller caterers are more likely to be willing to work within your budget. They are also likely to have personal service and high quality food. As with any vendor, of course, check their references first and taste their food before you sign a contract and hand over a down payment.
These are some of the easy ways to control your event food costs. Next week, I’ll talk more depth about your catering budget and how you can use it to save money.
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