What makes guests happy at a Wedding?

What makes guests happy at a wedding? I think it is a warm welcome and good quality food. Food should be well laid out in a buffet, served well in a calm and neat environment, without guests having to wait for food and jostling among the diners, and worse still, insufficient food. In the good old days, it was believed and often said that the success of a marriage and the strong bond of relationship between the two families and their friends depended to a great extent on the good quality of food served during the marriage functions. Many hosts are aware of these facts but somehow at most functions, things go wrong and guests leave dissatisfied with the arrangements.

I am writing this article in context with a recent wedding I attended in Hyderabad. Every aspect of the marriage was superlative including the buffet menu. The number of guests who attended the marriage was close to ten thousand. The food and serving stations for the guests were insufficient. Crowds were jostling all around the buffet tables and live cooking stations. Midway, items on the menu began to vanish from the tables. The hosts were missing from the dining area as there is nothing they could do at this stage to improve the situation. There was an inconvenience to the majority of the guests and most of them left dissatisfied with the dinner arrangements. When there was such a large guest list, the arrangements should have been on a much larger scale. Somehow this aspect was overlooked by the hosts or they were misguided by the event managers and caterers.

Unfortunately, even when the guest list is fewer than one thousand, things go wrong at some functions. This is mostly because of the carelessness or greed of the caterers. A few or all the preparations are not up to the mark, they do not arrange sufficient serving stations leading to crowding and waiting by the guests and towards the end, most of the items would not be available even to the most important family members of the hosts.

Fortunately, such unpleasant situations have not risen in any of the functions in our family. And I hope this happy trend would continue in the future. In the past, for all the marriages in our family, there was a cook by the name of Yashodhamma and her team who did excellent work for us. Today we engage a popular caterer, select a moderate menu, discuss the quality of each item and the dinner arrangements in detail, give the caterer the correct figure of expected guests and finally ensure that all guests are happy and have something nice to comment on the food, the arrangements and our hospitality. I am sure you too would agree with my observations on what makes guests happy at a wedding.