Wedding food: A new marriage of sustainable and trendy

I’ve always been a guest, never a bride, so I can say this objectively: Only airline food has a worse reputation than what’s served at weddings. Captive audiences can’t be choosy.

While air fare will always be a joke, wedding food is evolving thanks to what might be called “no trend left behind.” Five years ago brides could get away with putting their budget before their guests’ palates. Now all the innovations changing the way America eats are being adopted by caterers and wedding planners — and happy couples themselves — who are taking cues from food television, the farm-to-table phenomenon, the organic/seasonal/sustainable movement and every other flash in the kitchen. Even food trucks are rolling up to the fanciest receptions. (Cupcakes, however, are apparently off the table.)

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“People want to push the wedding boundaries,” says Andrea Duty of Bake Sale in Austin, who caters to couples who dislike cake and want a less hidebound dessert with a more individualistic feel. “This generation has almost a competitive attitude. They want their weddings to land on the big wedding blogs, such as Style Me Pretty and 100 Layer Cake.”

That means food with flair. A series of small plates, rather than salad followed by chicken or fish and a slice of dazzling but dry cake. Avegetarian menu. A whole pig roasted in view of the guests. A dessert buffet loaded with just pies or an array of one-bite sweets.

“People’s expectations are higher even when there are 300 or 400 guests,” says Peter Callahan, a top New York caterer who wrote “Bite by Bite” (Clarkson Potter, 2011), a collection of sophisticated mouthfuls for weddings and other soirees.

Or, as Sina Molavi, the chef at Occasions Caterers in Washington, puts it: “People are looking for more of a restaurant-style dinner.” Rather than an industrial slab of salmon poached hours earlier and dressed with dill sauce, clients want seared-to-order halibut with celeriac puree and green apple ragout.

For the cocktail hour, Eric Michael, co-founder and creative director of Occasions in Washington, says his company has provided mixologists with unique cocktails and has set up food stations dispensing local charcuterie, made-to-order sevicheand single-ingredient stunts such as tomatoes prepared six ways. For one couple, “health-conscious but very food-savvy,” Occasions created a sit-down dinner that started with local carrots, pickled and cut into ribbons, served with fava bean and mint puree and pea tendrils, followed by hand-rolled sheep’s-milk ricotta tortellini in leek broth with chive blossoms, and a main course of organic hen cooked sous vide with vegetables bought at the farmers market the day before.

Wedding porn or “Portlandia”-worthy parody?

Michael says clients are now so locavore-ish that Occasions can have farmers plant to order for a wedding, if time allows. Which is what La Prima Catering, also in Washington/Baltimore, is doing for a wedding in September. The seeds for the kale that will become a salad with lavender honey were planted June 20; the main course, chicken seasoned with lemon grass and paired with roasted eggplant, will be made with chicks that will grow up on the farm after they arrive Aug. 8.