It’s the wedding of the season. No, it’s the wedding of the year, and possibly the century.

And you’re the caterer. What do you do?

Money is obviously no object. This is likely to be the destination wedding to end all destination weddings. It might be held on Bali, or the top of the Eiffel Tower, or Mars.

The bride is an entertainer, one of the best known and most popular people in the world. Everyone seems to like her, except those who are jealous of her popularity, and also her ex-boyfriends.

Her ex-boyfriends are legion.

The groom is a professional athlete, just a couple of years removed from being one of the very best in his sport.

Here is the problem for you as the caterer: The bride’s friends are likely to be thin and extremely image-conscious. They’ll be gluten-free, lactose-free, fat-free, meat-free, seed oil-free, sugar-free and carb-free, and many will be restricted to consuming, like, 8 calories a day.

The groom’s friends are likely to be big and burly, eager to dine on massive amounts of protein, snack foods and beer.

And then there are the fans to take into consideration, especially the bride’s fans who will try to crash the wedding. The bride’s fans are largely teenage girls, who tend to eat like … teenage girls.

What to serve?

Let’s start with food for the groom’s friends. You’re going to want to go with beef, obviously. Steak would be the first choice, probably filet mignon.

But these are sports guys, and they probably like sports-guy food. I’m thinking hamburgers might be more appropriate. Of course, some sports guys require as much as 9,000 calories a day to stay in top playing condition, so you might want to go with a hamburger patty on top of a steak, topped with a fried egg.

You’ll definitely want to serve hot sauce with that.

Many banquets offer a choice of beef or chicken, and this one should be no different. The poultry option should be chicken wings, naturally.

For side dishes, I’d recommend chips, popcorn, peanuts and pretzels.

The bride’s friends might want to sit in a different room, so they don’t have to witness so many guys eating Neanderthal Chow, presumably without silverware. Their dining will be daintier and more refined.

For them, you will want to start with an appetizer of lobster mousse tart, if only because I’ve never had it before and it sounds amazing.

After that, I’d advise closely hewing to famous culinarian Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s dictum, less is more. The bride’s trendy friends will be more interested in taking pictures of their food than actually eating it.

So perhaps you’ll want to offer a plate of garnishes. No meal, just the garnishes that would accompany it: nasturtium flowers, sprigs of parsley, crispy shallots, pomegranate seeds, fried sage leaves and the like.

Or you could serve a dish of pollen three ways: fennel pollen, pine pollen and bee pollen.

If you really want to get fancy, you could serve fennel pollen sprinkled over foam, served with extra pretensions.

Finally, there are the fans to consider — and I specifically mean the bride’s fans. The groom has fans, too, but the wedding is likely to be on a weekend and, you know, there will be a game on.

Fortunately, teenage girls are easy to please. Well, not easy to please, exactly, but their needs are easy to fulfill. Inexpensively, too.

Basically, teenage girls can live on Raising Cane’s chicken fingers, or so I am told. So you’ll definitely need to serve a lot of those. A side dish of baby yogurt bites would be appropriate, with bubble tea to wash it down and ice cream and Nerds Gummy Clusters for dessert.

I’ve been to weddings where they served worse.

____

Thanks to Eileen Humphrey for suggesting this column.

____

©2025 STLtoday.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.