Trends in Wedding Menus
As with fashion, so with food – you need to be on top of the seasons and trends.
At WeddingSutra Engage held in Hyderabad, Executive Chef at the Taj Krishna, Nitin Mathur, shared some trends related to cuisines and food served at weddings.
If there’s one thing guests remember after the wedding celebrations are done with, it’s the food. Whether a buffet or sit-down, your choice of cuisine, quality of dishes and dessert can make or break your event.
Chef Nitin Mathur is a veteran at planning menus for countless weddings at the Taj Krishna and other Taj hotels. He shares his considered opinion on current food trends.
Focus on the clean, creative and cutting edge
There’s a lot that goes into planning the perfect wedding menu. You want something unique and innovative but must appeal to a diverse range of guests and their tastes, so make sure you have something for everyone!
We’ve created clever finger food like guacamole inside a paani-puri to live appam counters because everyone wants something different.
There is also new focus on fresh, healthier food. So the use of minimal oil is preferred. People also want to present seasonal menus and ask us to use vegetables that are at their freshest rather than canned or frozen ones.
Salad counters are getting larger and people want to have a mix of salads with all their splendid colours, textures, dressings and herbs.
Innovation and interest play their part in creating excitement at dinner time. We’re getting more and more requests for the parmesan-wheel – a large wheel of parmesan with a risotto in the centre. The idea being, as you spoon out the warm risotto, you get your garnish of parmesan with it.
Go live!
It’s easy to see the appeal of the live station. Whether it’s the live chaat counters or the ones that make pasta or noodles right there, for you, people love to watch and be served that way. We like creating live counters that hero regional cuisine – for example, imagine hot, steaming appams made before your eyes, to be enjoyed with vegetable or chicken stews.
Go Global
Presenting a range of cuisines is also an ongoing trend. It gives people the opportunity to sample different foods at the same event. So a typical wedding buffet will feature some regional cuisine, a pan-Asian palette, Continental staples and Mediterranean dishes. Rajasthani, Bengali, Keralite and Punjabi cuisines are the most requested regional choices even if the bride and groom are not from these regions.
You must always account for those who don’t like to experiment with their food though. A lot of hosts ensure that some dishes from their community cuisine are served so that older or more conservative guests don’t have a problem.
The Hero Ingredient Special
If you’re looking at global trends, then you’d have encountered the tasting station – a live counter with at least six different dishes created from one exotic ingredient. Imagine introducing your guests to their first truffles with six different amazing truffle creations at your wedding’s truffle counter! At the Taj Krishna, we have had live stations featuring asparagus, mushrooms, cheese, truffles and much more.
Not just desserts
The sky’s the limit when it comes to getting creative with the sweet stuff. Macaroon towers, bridal cupcakes, bespoke wedding cakes; at a recent function, we even made mehndi cookies to go with the occasion. These were done in the shape of motifs from mehndi designs.
To sum it up, the trends in wedding menus are generous enough to incorporate both regional and international cuisines but there’s a definite focus on innovation, healthy food and a tendency to look for desserts that go above and beyond the usual Indian suspects.
Photos Courtesy- Abhishek Sarkar, SutraSnapperz and Camera Crew
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