Caribe Royale offers ways to incorporate your pets into the reception.
THROUGHOUT THIS PIECE, I ASKED LOCAL NOTABLES AND FRIENDS WHAT THEY LIKE TO PREPARE FOR SOMEONE TO LET THEM KNOW THEY LOVE THEM, OR THAT THEY CARE.
There’s a moment at every wedding when the room shifts. The ceremony is over, the toasts are done, and everyone is a person again; hungry, happy, and probably a little emotional (or sauced), and they start loosening their belts and their ties. What happens next says everything about how much the couple thought about the people in that room.
More couples are trying to treat their wedding menu as a statement and not just an event planner’s line item. It’s become a declaration of who they are and what they stand for. Food, they’ve apparently decided is how you tell your guests: we see you, we thought about you, we want you to feel at home here, and we appreciate you flying into our random destination wedding and buying everything on our Amazon Wish List.
Food has always been central to courtship too. It’s part of the foreplay to marriage. A first date over dinner is practically a cross-cultural institution, and there’s a reason we default to it. Sharing a meal is one of the most intimate things two strangers can do. You learn how someone treats a server, whether they’re adventurous or cautious, what they grew up eating, do they eat with their mouths closed or does it get stuck in their gorgeous beard, how they handle a menu in a language they don’t speak (if it’s my partner, he starts sweating and runs out of the restaurant to get a burger).
Cooking for someone for the first time is its own kind of declaration too, it says I paid attention, I made time, I wanted to do something that required effort, because you’re totally worth it and I want to do more than just touch your jugs. I want your jugs to relax. Like that scene in Heated Rivalry when Rossanov makes a tuna melt for Hollander and then asks him a million times if he likes it. That’s when the audience was being told that there were feelings involved and they weren’t just hard-core friends with benefits anymore.
Bringing food to someone who is sick, remembering their order, knowing they hate cilantro because they have that weird gene that makes it taste like soap, these are the small acts that snowball into something that feels like being known. Before couples ever think about wedding menus, they’ve already been using food to say the things that are hardest to say out loud. Like when I make my man eat leftovers for dinner because I’m mad at him for something stupid.
“I love to make a reverse seared ribeye with sage brown butter to finish it off with, served with a nice fully loaded baked potato packed with butter, a dollop of Greek yogurt and always stuffed full of fresh bacon. Serve that with a nice cold wedge salad and wham bam thank you mam I love you.” -—Justin Stamper, Zombie House Flipping, Orange Blossom Homes.
Nothing lands harder at 10 p.m. than a tray of sliders, a taco station, or a basket of fries that appears just as the dancing hits its peak, or the Best Man’s gummies start to kick-in. The late-night snack has become a fun, anticipated moment of the modern wedding reception, partly because it’s delicious, and partly because it signals that the couple planned far enough ahead to think about what their guests would need three hours in. It’s often the most personal food of the night too. A Miami couple might bring out a croqueta station. A Louisiana family might send out boudin balls. Whatever it is, it tends to be the food people really remember, because it happens at the best part of the night, when grandma took her bra off. Or whatever.
Pizza Bruno owner Bruno Zacchin,
“So for me and what I am always requested by my kid and my, well, soon to be ex-wife. Has always been a cheese and butter pasta. It’s boring but it’s comfort food that made right hits home for them all the time. Fresh grated parm, GOOD unsalted butter Plugra or Kerrygold, salt, and really good dry pasta, preferably bronze cut.” —Bruno Zacchini, Owner, Pizza Bruno.
Increasingly, couples are working with their caterers to incorporate dishes passed down through their families, a grandmother’s rice and peas, a mother’s pierogi recipe, a sauce that’s been in the family so long no one knows who started it. These dishes require more coordination and sometimes more courage (scaling grandma’s recipe to 200 people is not for the faint of heart, so don’t be afraid to ask a caterer for help). Guests who know the family recognize these dishes immediately. Guests who don’t get a window into who these people are.
“For me, I love making Vietnamese-style lemongrass curry chicken wings, slow-braised low and slow for hours with care and served over white jasmine rice. It’s homey and comforting and so delicious full of umami!” -—Ricky Ly, Owner, Tasty Chomps.
When two people from different cultural backgrounds marry, the food table can become a kind of bridge, not just for them, but for their families and friends. A spread that reflects both families sets of flavors. Two culinary traditions sharing the same table can do a lot more work than any dumb speech.
It might mean jerk chicken and arroz con pollo sharing the same buffet, or a raw bar alongside a West African groundnut stew, or a dessert spread that includes both baklava and tres leches. For guests who grew up with one of those traditions, seeing their food at the center of a celebration is a welcoming nod. For guests unfamiliar with it, it’s an invitation (unless you’re like all those weirdos I met at Taste of Lake Mary last month who had never seen a samosa before and ran away without even trying. More for me!). When my brother married his amazing chef wife, they set up food stations that represented their lives apart and their lives together, including a little beer cheese soup station to represent the booth where they met during Food and Wine at EPCOT. It was adorable and delicious.
John and Juliana Calloway, owners of Black Rooster Taqueria.
“For my beautiful wife and partner, Juliana, nothing says I love you more than a big steak cooked on the grill with fries and asparagus, a nice glass of sparkling wine followed by red for her steak.” —John Calloway, Chef/Owner, Black Rooster Taqueria.
