Welcome back to Let’s Cut the Cake! This is our newest series on AJ and I planning our own wedding as a pair of wedding photographers! Over the 9 months, we’ll be sharing our process and inviting you in on our decision making and witnessing trial + errors!

It’s called Let’s Cut the Cake because that’s what AJ and I will be doing on May 16th, 2020!! Can’t wait to have you all along on this crazy long, messy path that is actually planning a wedding.

We are officially off our summer hiatus and ready to jump back into wedding planning! You can expect weekly posts again every Wednesday here on the blog!

Our Catering Decisions

Feeding your guests is maybe the top and only thing your guests are expecting from attending your wedding. Obviously, we can all hope for an open bar and a food option that is good and that it isn’t served too late in the evening…!

When budgeting for our wedding and settling our priorities, we decided that catering was kind of up there for us! AJ is a bit of a foodie, in the sense that he is always thinking about his next meal and is hoping for the best meal yet. 

That being said, I wanted to let him take the lead on the catering. He decided a long time ago that fajitas were our wedding meal. We’ve had good catered fajitas and not so good catered fajitas so we were hunting for a middle ground that would fit within our budget!

My main want was family style, versus buffet. In my experience it’s just a more intimate setting, and allows everyone to stay seated and watch the toasts, etc. It just feels like everyone is all together!

Sitting down at your table the whole time, passing plates and sharing allows for easy conversation between your tablemates! We have a lot of family coming but also a lot of friends from all different parts of our lives. Once we get a great seating chart mapped out, we can help these friends make connections and find groups to dance with later on!

With this, Ashley told us a few things to be mindful of. Family style most likely means table service for refilling water, sometimes even getting drinks from the bar, or refilling wine. That means more staff, so up goes the quote. 

THEN you have to have all your extra dishes to go on all ten of your table tops. That’s way more dishes that would be required for a buffet dinner. Just a few more things to add to our total cost! So really the name of the game was finding something delicious, that could give us a family style option within our budget, and traveled to Fredericksburg. 

Also, me and my immediate family are vegetarians, so while there are veggie fajitas that are always an option, I was hoping to get a vegetarian option as well! I was thinking something like enchiladas or stuffed peppers…the usual delicious veggie option on a wedding day! 🙂

The Catering Contenders

Ashley came back to us with a handful of options. AJ has been referred Papas (they’re down in San Antonio, also the same overarching company as carabbas, etc.) so we were considering them. Root Cellar, Foundations Food, Whim, and Contigo were also on the table.

Right off the bat, Contingo was waaaay out of our price range. Also a little too ~complex~ for our tastes! So we nixed them. 

We really considered Pappas, but to be honest their quote was so crazy low that we were suspicious. We would also have to go down to San Antonio for a tasting, and with travel fees and everything we decided to nix them too.

So Whim, Root Cellar, and Foundation Foods became our top three contenders!

Root Cellar is down in San Marcos and before they opened up their catering biz it was just their delicious restaurant! I would make my parents take me there when they visited because it was SOOO GOOD and a little expensive for a college student 🙂 

Also, we’ve met Vanessa the catering coordinator a handful of times and she is so awesome! We have always wanted to work with her! So needless to say I was rooting for them! 

Foundation Foods is a newer catering company, started by a woman who used to work at Whim and who Ashley knows personally! We were excited about trying them out as well! 

Whim is, ya know, Whim. They have been around for basically forever, their food is great and they’re super trustworthy! So even though they were a little bit outside our budget, they were a contender!

So, like I said, this is mainly AJ’s thing.

I’m gonna let him take over for a sec:

Holly is exactly right – food is of paramount importance to me. Not just on our wedding day, but every day. So this was quite a task I had in front of me. How do I pick a meal that will not only evoke our relationship, but simultaneously be a delicious experience for our guests and celebrate our new union?

Fortunately, this isn’t my first rodeo. And no – I don’t mean that in the sense of having eaten a lot of food. I mean having eaten a lot of wedding food; both Holly and I are intimately familiar with wedding food from all of the unions of our wonderful couples!

So when we decided on fajitas as our main course, it wasn’t solely because it’s in my top five favorite meals (join my personal email list for recipes), but because it was the most personally exciting to me as a vendor/guest when we learned it was the meal of choice for our couples. Nothing excites people – nay brings them together, like a sizzling plate of fajitas. 

So after we’d made that determination, we were fortunate that Ashley presented us with a few options within our budget. Between those, I was stuck between Foundation and Root Cellar. Foundation was excellent – their fajitas were a more southern, grill-style take with nice pink steak strips. However, we weren’t completely sold on the overall experience and the sides and vegetarian options felt like they could have been a little better. 

As soon as we’d tasted the first dish, Root Cellar checked all my boxes. Their enchilada casserole (a necessary vegetarian option for our meat free friends and fam) was bomb, and they followed up with some truly fantastic, consistent and delicious fajitas.

This was impressive as is, and had us contemplating booking, but they were nice enough to send us home with leftovers. For those who don’t know me intimately, I love leftovers; something that was instilled in me at a young age. I took those same fajitas to work with me the following day, ate them for lunch, and was absolutely sold.

So I was hooked – but what about our budget? We just got the quotes back today and were thrilled to find we were 10% under budget!! A match made in sizzling, delicious heaven. With all that in mind, we had no hesitations at all to confidently select Root Cellar to cater as our top contender for our wedding!

Now we get to pat ourselves on the back and check off one of the biggest things on our list!! And get excited for all the passed apps and delicious dinner!!

Want to hear more about the decisions we’ve made so far? Click here to read about how we decided on our venue, and how it’s a photographer’s dream!!

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