Catering for Large Weddings

Making a Great Impression on Wedding Parties

The wedding breakfast is the focus of any grand matrimonial celebration and should be your main focus when setting out to be a great wedding venue. The most important goals to consider with regard to this part of your wedding package are listed below. Each one is equally important but some are easier to achieve than others.

• Spotless, High Quality Linen – As you might expect, we place great importance on the quality and cleanliness of the linen used for wedding receptions and believe that any hotel wishing to make a name for itself in this business should do the same. When guests arrive for the wedding breakfast, they should be greeted with the sight of dozens of snowy-white tablecloths, each one a testament to the care and attention that your hotel pays to details. On top of these should be pristine napkins, neatly folded and as pure white as the tablecloths themselves.
• Sparkling Glassware – All of your glassware should be gleaming, with not a smear in sight. It can be much harder than many people imagine to achieve this aim, especially with glasses that have seen a few months of service, but it is far from impossible and should be a primary objective.
• Gleaming Cutlery – There is absolutely no excuse for dull, smeared or spotted cutlery so don’t put yourself in the position of having to make one. As with glassware, older utensils may be harder to polish to a fine shine so if you want to make a great impression on your wedding guests, be sure to replace your cutlery on a regular basis.
• Flawless Flowers – Each of the items mentioned above is of vital importance when setting the tables for a big wedding breakfast but in one sense they are really all just part of the backdrop for the stars of the show: the flowers. Whether you have a first-class in-house florist or you use an outside specialist to do the honours, you must ensure that each arrangement is flawlessly beautiful, breathtakingly stunning, fantastically fresh, and unbelievably attractive. In short, they need to be perfect!

• Place Cards – The design and printing of place cards is almost always the responsibility of the happy couple but it is an excellent idea to include them as an optional extra in your wedding package. You need to take the design of the cards into account when putting together the floral arrangements and if you are using coloured linen, when choosing the napkins and tablecloths too. This is why it is worth offering to handle them in house. While we always recommend sticking with classic white for all table linen, some couples may have their hearts set on a more colourful backdrop to their celebrations so it is important to make sure that you have access to alternative linens when necessary.
• Tables and Chairs – Quite often overlooked by hotels and guests alike, the furniture only becomes important when it lets the side down, i.e. it becomes visible for all the wrong reasons. Don’t make the mistake of forgetting to check that your tables and chairs remain in excellent condition and rectifying the issue if this is not the case. Tables are less visible than chairs, owing to the fact they should covered with your flawless tablecloths, but if the legs start to deteriorate it is time to call in the furniture restoration experts.

The Rest of the Package

The wedding breakfast is your chance to bedazzle and charm your guests but if you want them to recommend your venue to all their friends in breathless tones, you need to make sure that the accommodation, service, food and drink all live up to expectations. An extensive menu is not always the best approach when it comes to the food: pick a number of classics and contemporary favourites and make sure that your kitchen aces them all. You can afford to be as flexible as you wish when it comes to liquid refreshment: if your clients are prepared to pay for it, you should be able to supply it.

Wedding parties from out of town will often require overnight accommodation as well, which gives you another opportunity to show them just what you can do when you put your mind to it. Luxurious bedsheets and pillowcases should go without saying but we think they are worth a mention, simply because some hotels are a little slow to replace their bed linen when it starts to show signs of wear and tear. If you can’t justify the expense of replacing your bed linen wholesale on a regular basis, consider hiring it from a specialist company such as ourselves.

Some Final Thoughts
There are so many factors to consider when putting together wedding packages in York, Chester, Doncaster and other towns and cities in the North that it is not surprising so many venues fail to deliver on their promises. You can ensure that your clients receive the best service possible with an extensive in-house staff training program but be aware that you don’t have to do everything in house: use the best local hire companies for linen, glassware and other items to make life easier for you and your workforce.