Engagement Party Catering: What To Actually Serve

No rules, which is the problem

A wedding has a shape everybody knows. A christening has a service to work around. An engagement party has neither. It is whatever you decide it is, which sounds liberating until you are trying to work out whether people will expect a meal.

They will not, as long as you are clear. The trouble comes from the middle ground: food that is too substantial to be nibbles and too light to be dinner, put out at a time that suggests one and delivers the other.

Pick one of three, and commit

Drinks and something to pick at. A grazing table, canapés, people standing. Nobody expects a meal and nobody gets one. Grazing boards are £97.00 a crate serving ten, and three crates run together on a long table is genuinely a centrepiece rather than a platter. Canapés are £9.80 a head for three each.

A proper buffet, eaten standing. The most common answer and the safest. Buffet 5 at £7.70 a head, sandwiches and savouries, or Buffet 9 at £11.00 with crisps, fruit, cake and juice for a party that runs into the evening. This is a meal and people will treat it as one.

A sit-down. Rare for an engagement, but if you are doing thirty in a private room it works. The hot buffet is £23.50 a head with a fifty minimum, so under that it is a conversation rather than a menu choice.

What does not work is a small buffet at seven o’clock for people who arrived at six having skipped dinner.

The timing mistake

Food out too early. An engagement party usually starts around seven, people drift in until eight, and if the buffet went out at half six it has been picked over by the time half the guests arrive.

Put it out about an hour after the start time. If the party runs late, that is also when people most need it, and a buffet that appears at eight is an event in itself rather than something that was already there.

Numbers, and the guest list problem

Engagement parties have the loosest guest lists of any celebration. People say yes and do not come; people bring someone. Order for slightly more than you expect, and remember that a buffet portion is a genuine meal rather than a snack.

For a house party of thirty, one buffet portion each is right. For a function room of sixty where people will be drinking for four hours, go a level up rather than ordering more portions. The same money spent on Buffet 9 rather than extra Buffet 5 gets you more variety and lasts better.

If it is outdoors

A summer engagement in a garden is the one occasion where a hog roast from £795 makes obvious sense. It feeds fifty without seating fifty, it works outside, and it gives the evening a focal point that a table of sandwiches does not.

It needs about three metres by five of flat ground and a few hours of cooking, so it is booked as an event rather than ordered online. If it might rain, the roast is fine, we work under a gazebo we bring, but think about where your guests will stand.

What we will ask you

The date, roughly how many, where it is going and what time you want it out. That is enough for a price on the phone.

Then dietary requirements and please give us numbers rather than proportions. Every buffet is 30% vegetarian before anybody asks, and vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free and halal portions are made separately and labelled.

Planning one? Party catering has the full range and prices, or get a quote and tell us what you are thinking.