Catering costs

Mine is in the same ball park as you. We're planning for 60 guests and having a plated dinner, with passed hors d'oeuvres, dessert, coffee/tea, late night snack, set up/tear down, dish ware, and staff, and the quoted price was $7,400. We tasted the plate and it blew us away, so we decided to go for it.

Originally we were thinking of going BBQ but we didn't want guests having to line up for their food, but the cost would've been closer to $3,500.

View quoted message Which caterer is this? I’m interested.

I would look at other quotes. It's the first one. You may find better. I'd get quotes from as many as you can. Do they have a minimum number of people? Our minimum is 80. If we only had 50 it would make our price around the $160 you were quoted.

Thats expensive thats 160 pp. ours is 110 pp with open bar! im sure you can a cheaper venue!

Not sure where you are located but we are doing family style (which tends to be the most expensive option) but we went with a caterer who does BBQ and used them for mains and late night and have actually found another, smaller caterer to do salads and sides (didn't want the meal to be too heavy). Just for doing this and picking the salads up ourselves, we saved a bunch and for dinner we have spent under 8000.

If you want to cut some costs and serve other sides or find other ways to save, most of the caterers we met with were happy to serve other vendor's food for us

The Open bars we considered ended up costing about 40 bucks per head so we are doing toonie drinks instead.

Another thing I have found is to look at the number of serving staff they have quoted you. This is a big expense and often you won't need as many servers as they say. For example, we have one of our bartenders jumping off bar to help serve dinner then heading back to bar for cocktail hour. This eliminated the need for an additional server by using someone that was already going to be there.

The price sounds reasonable unless you got other quotes that didn't include the bar and staff. The fact that your getting the full deal by the vendor and their services is great without any hassles on your end.

That's a fair bit... I have 225 guests for my wedding and although we are going with a BBQ caterer our bill without alcohol is going to be around $4,500 and then we are thinking the alcohol and bar service will cost around $5,000 giving us a total of $9,500 for like quadruple the amount of people that you are having...

Maybe get the breakdown and see what they are charging per person and what you get for it?

Including an open bar I think that price isn't horrible but I'm sure you could get better. I heard from a friend of mine that their open bar was originally $6000 but their guests broke the record for going over budget and it was something like $**** at the end. But they had a lot more guests than you. And our food at our wedding is about $45 a person. Which includes venue, day of coordinator, av systems, set up and tear down, bartenders and servers ect for the whole night. We are not having an open bar due to alcoholism in the family.

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Hmmmm… what's the dessert? Is there any late night tables or is that it? I think it's a little high and you should check out some other options.

We are having buffet style as well for 28.50/person. The catering company is from Ponoka, Alberta; home-cooked meals, and they were recommended by our venue. I think it depends on which part of the city/province are the caterers from. City caterers tend to charge more. But that being said, one of the caterers that we considered (from Edmonton), quoted us 75cad per guest, with a pretty generous menu (dinner+appetizers+late night snacks).

We chose the Ponoka caterer as it fits our budget more and the tasting went really well. They make such delicious food! Funny, much much yummier than the 75cad pp caterer from the city. 160 cad per person is too steep in my opinion

View quoted message This is in addition to venue space rental. This also includes the gratuities (admin fee) 3 appetizers, and dessert. I'm just so confused over what is an appropriate amount to spend on food :/

I think it depends on what it consists of. Is there also appetizers, dessert, and a late night station? I think $160/pp is a little steep for a buffet tho. And is this in addition to the cost of the venue space rental?