Weddingbee Blog

Last weekend, Mr. Jaguar and I headed out to our wedding reception venue for an evening of food and merriment. The venue we’ve booked has multiple function rooms in it, so we weren’t in the particular room that we’ll be having our reception in, but it was still decorated beautifully. We arrived to champagne, a candy buffet and a string quartet.

All photos in this post were taken by me. You’ll have to forgive me on the slightly fuzzy and badly lit images, but they were taken with my trusty old iPhone in a candlelit room!

First things first: the alcohol. It was free flowing, and quite nice. The champagne was to die for, and the house wines included on the tables were both really tasty. I opted to just sip and taste, since I was driving home, but Mr. Jaguar agreed that they were lovely.

There were bread rolls with butter on the tables when we sat down, however they soon brought out a huge platter of wood-fired bread, with dishes of goats cheese, olive oils and diced tomato and herbs, so you could make your own form of bruschetta. That was mighty yummy—so yummy I forgot to take a picture of it. Trust me when I say it was pretty darned good.

We call our appetizer or starter dish an entrée in Australia (just to confuse my North American bees out there!) and for that, they brought out a chef’s selection of three meals: something with salmon in it that was super fancy, a cheese and ham dish with Mediterranean veggies, and a cold egg-roll type meal with both chicken AND beef strips in it. I wasn’t real fussed on any of them, to be frank. Mr. Jaguar really enjoyed the salmon, but we won’t be serving that at the wedding, so it’s back to the drawing board in terms of what entrée we’d like to pick for our menus.

For mains, the table was given an alternate serve meal. This is fairly common at most Australian weddings I’ve been to, and is what’s included in our catering package, too. The first of our mains was a breast of chicken, served on a bed of garlic risotto rice with a champagne cream sauce and asparagus to taste. I’m drooling a little bit just writing that out again, because wow. It was awesome. So, so awesome.

The alternate serve was a fillet of steak, served with potatoes and fancy vegetables. It had a sauce too, but it wasn’t that flavourful, which kind of spoiled the meal. If it had have had a bit more of a kick to it, it could’ve really perked up that whole dish. We’re passing on a steak option on the wedding day, because of this very reason.

I think we’ll definitely be looking into serving the chicken dish as a main (so, so yummy!) but we’ll be consulting their other options for our alternate serve. I’m leaning towards something fancy, like a roasted lamb dish, since that’ll be nice and warm for our wintery June wedding.

Last but not least: dessert! I was most excited for this course. On the big day, we’ll only be choosing from one option (and our wedding cake, of course!) but the menu tasting had another chef’s selection of three popular dishes. This included a hazelnut gelato slice, a creme caramel with pistachio toffee, and a raspberry and ricotta pastry torte.

The gelato, surprisingly, was my least favourite. The creme caramel was pretty darned good, but the raspberry slice! Oh em gee. The photo above doesn’t even come close to doing it justice—if you viewed it from the side, there would’ve been about six layers of pastry in it, with creamy ricotta and big ol’ chunks of berries in between. It was to die for!

All in all, it was a fun evening out with a few nice tastes involved. Mr. Jaguar and I treated this as our belated Valentine’s Day date night, since we’re trying to keep costs down and didn’t want to go overboard this year—so just getting to see our venue again and imagining ourselves there in a few months’ time was fantastic.

Did you have a menu tasting at your venue? How did you find the experience?