We need a caterer who is going to give us something nice for the money that we have.

What can you feed 50-60 guests on a $5,000.00 budget?  Dessert or stationary hors d’oeuvres.  Because this is a wedding – and we want to present a nice picture – we are going to rent real china, flatware, dishware, and linen.  This is very important as we are holding the wedding in a nice location.  If it were a picnic, we would plan differently, but since it’s not – we have to plan accordingly.

Because we are not doing a full meal, we have to hold this shindig at a time other than a meal time.  Since the Bride and Groom want to marry at night, here is my general timeline.

We need to know how much time we will need at the site and with the caterers as we are paying both hourly.  Most sites and caterers have a 4 hour minimum – so we need to make sure we satisfy these requirements – which we do.  Based on our schedule we will need 5 hours of time including set up and clean up.

You can go back to the video tour of the site we are using.  We are going to use the main reception hall (the Pavilion room) for the ceremony and cake/dancing portion of the reception and we are going to use the outside hallway for the dessert/hors d’oeuvre portion.

For 5 hours of time, the rental fee will be $650.00.

The couple decided that they wanted to have an hors d’oeuvre display.  Therefore, we are working from this Menu from Entree Metropolitan.

Typically for a normal cocktail hour, I would recommend 6-8 pieces per person as a minimum.  Since the guests have (in theory) have already eaten (which we will tell them to do on the invitation), and we are working with 45 minutes, we are going to work with 6 pieces per person.  Two pieces are included in each item – so we need 3 different items.

I’m going to show you how it can work.

The only food item that’s not included in this breakdown is the cake.

The site only has black chairs, so we have allocated additional monies to rent white chairs.  Since the site has linen, we have have not included linen in our budget.  The site has all the tables that we need.

Happy planning!

Tags: Planning a 5000 Wedding

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 at 7:38 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.