Now, if your budget is really tight, you probably are going to need to find an alternative to having your reception catered.  All wedding food is, is food, with the exception of the wedding cake maybe, so you don’t need to have the fanciest foods from the most talked about catering company in order to have a successful wedding reception.  I took one of these routes and it worked perfectly well for our situation.  There certainly were no complaints that I am aware of.  And really, most people attend a wedding and its reception more for the event than what they put in their bellies anyway, so chances are hardly anyone will notice that you didn’t have your reception’s wedding food served by a catering company.

Now, here are the different options you can choose over a professionally catered reception to save you money.  The first being, you still buy the bulk of your wedding food from companies that cater, however, they simply prepare, and maybe even deliver the food – and you and your family and friends set the wedding food up for consumption.  Many restaurants can prepare their menu items in bulk for catering purposes – I see catering menus all the times at places like sub shops, and heck even places like the Olive Garden and other such restaurants.  All you have to do is decide what type of wedding food you would like to have at your wedding reception, and either visit or call the restaurant requesting a catering menu.  And if it is within your budget, since it is coming from a restaurant that most likely at least half of your guests have already eaten at before, chances are good that it will still be a hit.  This way they are eating something familiar rather than some fancy-dancy wedding food that they are afraid to taste because it has some odd looking ingredients in it or a funny name they’ve never heard of before.

A second option, and the option that my husband and I chose, was to buy “party trays” of fruits, veggies, deli meats and sandwiches from the big discount grocery stores as our wedding food.  We bought bags of the li’l smokies sausages and heated them up in some barbecue sauce.  I believe we also bought a few bags of dinner rolls in case anyone just wanted some bread and butter with their fruit and sausages.  Yeah, I know, I can’t exactly claim it was a very classy variety of wedding food, but it fit our budget and as I said previously, no one really seemed to care that it wasn’t some fancy French or Italian dinner served up by professional wait staff by a catering company.

A final option, and this would probably work for extremely small weddings and a very close knit circle of friends and family – is a pot luck wedding food reception.  I am not kidding.  If you have a bunch of family and friends who enjoy cooking, you could easily get together with them a couple months before your wedding and ask them – in PERSON, because asking in their invitation is just tacky – if they would be willing to help out with the reception by bringing some type of dish for a pot luck lunch or dinner.  I mean, what do you think people did for wedding receptions before catering companies got off the ground?  It is not far fetched to imagine that several women would prepare dishes of different kinds of wedding food and bring it to the reception hall for everyone to enjoy.  It’s likely that in this day and age the chances of this actually happening anymore is relatively small, but it certainly is not out of the question, so if you’re in really dire straights with your budget, don’t overlook this option.  It may well be your ticket to the best wedding reception anyone in attendance has been to in a while.  And who can argue that home-cooked meals aren’t better than mass-manufacturered smoked sausages?  I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who would think so!