District Weddings

I hope that everyone enjoyed the long weekend and welcome to summer!

Today, Bride Blogger Kerry stops back in to tell us about how she found her caterer – yummy!

One of the hardest decisions for us to make in our wedding planning was on a caterer.  Our venue, River Farm, has a list of recommended wedding vendors, but couples are allowed to use whichever vendors they want.  In our initial research, we communicated with some of the bigger, more well-known catering companies in the area.  However, when we received quotes from them, they were all a bit out of our price range.

So we took stock of what was important to us about our menu, and what kind of style reception would work best for us.  Chris and I are both seafood lovers, so our wedding menu had to include several types of seafood.  All things considered, we knew that the best serving style for us would be a seated salad course and a dinner buffet.  For our 90-minute “cocktail hour” we wanted both butlered and stationary hors d’oeuvres.  It was also important to us (and a big money-saver) to have the ability to provide our own alcohol, rather than having a caterer charge us per hour with an open bar.

Chris’s mother passed along a recommendation for a company she knew that frequently catered corporate events—Kitchen Gourmet Caterers.  We were initially put off by only finding one review for them online, but Kitchen Gourmet provided us with several references of recent weddings they had catered.  The brides I contacted had nothing but high praise for Kitchen Gourmet and assured me that they go above and beyond with their events.

We drove down to Woodbridge, Virginia to meet with Kitchen Gourmet and to pick up some samples of their food.  After trying it and loving it, we asked if they could prepare our exact menu choices for us to sample.  A few weeks later we traveled back down to Woodbridge to pick them up.  What they had prepared for us was much more than we had imagined.  The portions were so generous that we feasted on the samples for the next four nights!  After having the opportunity to taste everything over and over, we knew without a doubt we wanted to book Kitchen Gourmet for our wedding.

Their price quote was very fair and was well under what many other caterers had quoted us.  I even asked if they could prepare an item not on their typical wedding menus (and not necessarily in season in October)—fried green tomatoes.  They were more than happy to do so, and I cannot wait to have fried green tomatoes as a side dish on our dinner buffet.

We had decided on crab cakes as one of the entree items for the menu, and we were interested to see how well Kitchen Gourmet could execute the perfect crab cake.  After tasting the first bite of the samples they prepared for us, we knew we had nothing to worry about—they were delicious!

Everyone says that the bride and groom never get a chance to eat on their wedding day because they’re so busy making the rounds to greet guests.  But with the tasty menu we have planned, I know we will definitely make time to enjoy everything!