BALTIMORE | 108 | WEDDINGS
Aisle S tyle FLOWERS
S
hakespeare famously dubbed music
the food of love, but every couple
knows that wedding guests expect to be
fed on a lot more than the crooning of Etta
James or Ed Sheeran after the “I dos” are
all said and done. Friends and family today
are accustomed to a very different wedding
food experience than previous generations.
“People used to joke about bad wedding
food,” says Claire Stewart, author of As
Long as We Both Shall Eat: A History of
Wedding Food and Feasts and an associ-
ate professor of culinary arts at New York
City College of Technology. “People don’t
joke about that anymore. Wedding food is
usually great.”
Gone are the days of formulaic wedding
packages, Stewart says, with world-trav-
eled and internet-savvy couples now opt-
ing for a more individualized experience.
“There used to be very standard wed-
ding menus, especially in hotels and
restaurants—Column A, Column B,
Column C, and different price points,” she
says. “[Now], a bride might say, ‘I’m from
Georgia and want peaches in my appetiz-
ers, and my husband is from Kentucky and
we want a whiskey cocktail.’ Not long ago,
the chef would have said, ‘Get out of here.’
Now it’s not a pain in the neck, it’s a way
to make more money. And the bride and
groom have the pleasure of saying nobody
else has had this.”ONCE UPON A TIME
If you started attending weddings in the
’90s or early 2000s, you probably wouldn’t
recognize the wedding-food standard that
persisted throughout much of the 20th
century. Eric Michael, a Baltimore native
who co-founded D.C.-based Occasions
Caterers with his twin brother in 1986, has
been in the business long enough to have
witnessed the revolution firsthand.
“When we started doing weddings, it
was often fully seated dinner buffets,” says
Michael. “Specialty cocktails and cocktail
stations were not a thing. Into the ’90s and
early 2000s, it shifted largely to plated
entrees. The idea was that a catered dinner
would be exactly the same experience asUNVEILED410.923.2881 • bridalsbyelena.com • 331 Gambrills Road • Suite 5 • Gambrills, MD 21054
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