Mmmm...fooood.....

Mr Wonderful and I are now at the point in the wedding planning where we need to make a decision about a caterer. And the best part about this is that you get to run around meeting various caterers and tasting free food.

On Sunday, we went to a caterer-sponsored "wedding faire" kind of thing, where there's a few vendors hawking their wedding-related shit (like photographers, officiants, etc.) but mostly it was a way for the caterer to get a bunch of people in one room and show how awesome their buffet can be. And I gotta say...not so impressed with the food. The problem with a buffet is that it always feels like you're at Bob's Big Boy smorgasbord, and the food has been sitting around for a couple of hours and picked over by a few hundred people, even when there's only like 50 people in the room and they are constantly bringing out fresh food. It still LOOKS ghetto, no matter how much you pretty it up with fancy table linens and stuff. And it still pretty much tastes like cardboard, because they are serving food for the lowest common denominator. You know, you can't make anything too spicy, because people have varying levels of spice-tolerance. So everything ends up tasting pretty much the same.

We really only liked two things about the event: one was a table setup (flowers, napkins, etc.) that I took a picture of on my phone, and the other was a cake sample that was absolutely delicious: lemon cake with passionfruit buttercream. It sounded like an odd combination, but it was so light and bright and uplifting - really an excellent flavor combination.

Tonight we're heading out to Concord to meet with a caterer & do a tasting, and I'm in discussions with a couple of other caterers as well. It's difficult sometimes to schedule the meetings because Mr Wonderful works swing shift and when he's got the weekend off, we have the kids. So it's a bit of a shuffle, but the catering is the most important part of our wedding, as far as I'm concerned, so I'm willing to spend extra time and actually go out of my comfort zone and talk to people on the phone (gasp!). Truly, I hate talking on the phone. I'd so much rather email - you always have the option to revise your statement before the person actually sees it. I just feel so stupid when I have to talk about something - I can never get my thoughts straight before something dumb pops out of my mouth.

Anyway, so...caterers. Anyone have a caterer they've used for a special event and thought was absolutely fantastic?