Micro-wedding catering

What a small wedding lets you do with food

With fewer than 50 guests, the kitchen stops cooking for a crowd and starts cooking for a table. That opens up formats that are impractical at 150:

• A family-style long table. Shared platters passed hand to hand: whole roasted fish or lamb shoulder, grain salads, vegetables at their Ontario peak in summer and fall. It feels like a very good dinner party.
• A plated tasting menu. Four or five smaller courses instead of three, with dishes that would not survive being held for 200 plates, such as a seared scallop or a soft-centred dessert.
• Guest choice at the table. Guests pick a main on the night, restaurant-style, rather than on an RSVP card months earlier. This works up to about 30 guests with a strong service team.
• Dishes with a story. A grandmother's recipe, the meal from your first date, a dish from each family's side. Small numbers mean we can test and get it right.

Menus for these formats live on our plated dinner menu page.

Why cost per guest goes up as guest count goes down

Couples are sometimes surprised that a 25-person dinner costs more per head than a 150-person buffet. The reason is fixed costs. A chef and a service team have minimum hours, delivery and rental trips cost the same for 25 guests as for 125, and kitchen equipment still has to be transported and set up. Spread over fewer guests, each of those costs is a larger share of the per-person price.

Our family-style dinners start from $78 per guest and plated dinners from $92, before HST and the 18% service charge. Staff time is billed at $38 per staff hour. The standard minimum for full-service events is 40 guests; if your guest list is smaller, tell us the number anyway. We will show you what a small dinner would cost in full, and say plainly if a drop-off menu or a smaller team is the better fit.

The upside: total spend is far lower than a large wedding, which is why many couples use the savings on a longer menu, better wine or an extra course rather than a bigger room.

Where micro-weddings happen in Toronto

Small weddings in the GTA tend to land in a few kinds of space, and each has its own catering constraints.

At home. A house in the Beaches or a family home in Oakville can seat 20 to 30 at rented tables. The home kitchen is rarely enough for plated service, so we usually bring hot boxes and induction burners and use your kitchen only for final plating. We check oven size, counter space and where dirty dishes will go before the menu is fixed.

A condo or party room. Buildings often limit party room bookings by hours and guest count, require a deposit and an elevator booking for deliveries, and may restrict open flame. Condo smoke detectors are sensitive; we avoid searing and deep frying on site and finish proteins in the oven. Our homes and condos guide has the checklist.

A rented private space. Galleries, studios and small rooftops and terraces often have no kitchen at all, so the menu has to be designed around what can be finished in portable ovens.

After City Hall. A civil ceremony in the afternoon followed by dinner nearby is a popular Toronto shape of day. Build in travel time: photos plus a downtown drive can easily take 90 minutes, and dinner should be timed to when the couple actually arrives.

Staffing a small wedding dinner

A plated dinner needs about one server per 10 to 12 guests, so a 24-guest wedding runs well with two servers, a chef and, if the menu has several hot courses, a second cook. Family-style service needs a little less. Even at 12 guests we recommend at least one server: someone has to clear plates, pour water and keep the table reset between courses, and it should not be the couple's parents.

With a small team, every person does several jobs. The server who pours wine may also plate dessert. We write the run of show with each role named so nobody is improvising when speeches start.

Dietary needs at a small table

At a micro-wedding, a single vegan or celiac guest is a real share of the table, so their meal should look like everyone else's rather than an afterthought. We ask for dietary needs by name, then adapt each course. For gluten-free guests we tell you honestly what our shared kitchen can and cannot guarantee, and for plant-based guests we build a parallel course rather than removing the protein.