Planning A Wedding That Your Guests Will Love, in Baltimore

Loving Your Guests
The very essence of what a wedding is about can be simply and clearly stated like this: Bringing people together to participate in and celebrate the union of two people, and the couple offering hospitality to those participants. 

That’s it!

From those two, short bits, of course, spring all of the complications, questions, and angst of wedding planning!

But right now, let’s just take that second bit, about offering hospitality, and look at the many and varied ways that you can care for your guests, and make them feel welcome and appreciated. 

Here are a couple of really important ones:

Food…
Feed them well. If your wedding and reception stretch over a meal hour, feed your guests a full meal, and one that they will enjoy. One of the things that guests remember most about weddings was whether the food was good or not—and if there was enough of it! 

Here at Chase Court, the wedding venue that I own, we have a list of five approved caterers. All of them put great—and even fantastic—food on the table. There are caterers at other venues who can do the same. There is absolutely no reason to have bad food at your wedding! Choose your caterer with care. If your budget is tight, have them do something low-cost and simple, and do it well. 

Accommodating Specific Dietary Needs
By the way, all of our caterers, and many others, are accustomed to feeding vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free guests. While they are often equipped to handle a surprise vegetarian or two, it’s far better hospitality to find out ahead of time which of your guests needs something other than an omnivore diet. As a long-term (several decades!) pesco-vegetarian myself, I am highly appreciative of hosts who give the caterer an opportunity to feed me something interesting and appropriate, rather than their “emergency” vegetarian option or—worse—part of the meal that the others are eating.

While we’re talking diversity, more and more people are becoming health-conscious in their eating habits. Many people are avoiding or limiting their red meat consumption, for example. While I’m not suggesting you go all rice and veggies, it’s good to be aware of what your guests will enjoy. You may not please everyone, but feeding them a good (and ideally, of course, great) nutritious meal that meets their needs is excellent hospitality.

…and Drink
Let’s talk about drink. For many Americans, alcohol consumption is tied to having a good time (an advertising concept for which we have the alcohol companies to thank!). Some form of bar service is almost always available at wedding receptions. However, you can control what you offer. 

We’re talking hospitality here, not the bar-to-end-all-bars. Many couples choose to serve just beer and wine. That’s perfectly fine. There is a craft beer explosion going on in Maryland and DC, so you can be creative and interesting in your choices. Likewise, the availability of good local wine is on the upswing. You can add great local and regional flavor—literally!—to your reception through your beverage choices. 

You can step that up a notch by adding a “signature” drink, which is generally something simple, using a single spirit like rum or gin. 

Want to offer more? Plenty of weddings go even wider, with a medium-size bar that may include vodka, gin, scotch, light rum, bourbon, and tequila, among others. Whiskey is having a moment around here, so that’s another way to work local flavor into your drink menu. 

Open Bar
All that said, I’d like to think that it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway): the only way to do a bar at a wedding is with an open bar. Don’t make guests pay for anything at your wedding! Eastern European traditional apron dances aside, everything that your guests experience at your wedding is part of your gift to them for being your guests. 

By the way, do you or your sweetie have your heart set on drinking your favorite single-malt whiskey at your wedding, but it’s too darn expensive for you to offer with the open bar? No problem! Most bartenders will be happy to keep a bottle under the counter, reserved for the happy couple.

Get the food and drink right and you’ll be a fantastic host, no matter what happens! 

Choosing a Venue
Let’s talk venue selection and its relationship to loving your guests.

What does venue have to do with hospitality, you ask?

There are lots of things to think about in choosing your wedding venue, including offering your guests the best hospitality possible while getting exactly the venue that’s right for you and your sweetheart. Here’s a few tips:

Getting the Right Fit
Get the right size. A venue should fit like your favorite frock, not too big and not too small. I heard a story recently about a wedding at a venue in which the guests were split into two rooms. The guests in the second room couldn’t see anything that was happening in the “main” room. For all practical purposes, they were second-class wedding guests. The DJ took the opportunity to point this out, loudly and brashly. Whatever humor might have been intended was lost to the all-too-apparent reality of the situation. The family was mortified. You can bet that things didn’t go well after that! The moral of the story: choose a venue that will comfortably fit all of your guests where they can see, hear, and participate in all of the action!

Speaking of comfortable fit, I’m sorry to report that not every venue is completely honest about their guest capacity. It’s important to ask how many guests can be comfortably seated in the space without being jammed in tight. If the venue has photographs available to show you how that looks, so much the better.

Space to Move
One of the things that I care about when my great hall is being set up by a caterer is the spacing between tables. There has to be enough room for guests and servers to walk through the room comfortably without bumping butts with the back of a seated guest’s head. That walk space is impossible to create if the venue overstates their capacity when they book the client. 

Table Size Matters
Making guests comfortable at their tables is a thing, too. Lots of weddings use 60” and 72” round tables for dinner service. The number of guests that comfortably fit at each table is a function of the size of the table and how each place is set. For example, more guests fit when you’re doing buffet service, with essentially no tableware preset on the table, as opposed to what’s usually called “seated and served,” when the catering staff is serving each guest at their table, and each place is set with two or three forks and spoons, a wine glass or two, a water glass, and so forth. All of those things add width to each place setting, so they decrease the number of guests that can fit at the table. 

A 60” round table comfortably seats eight to ten guests, and a 72” round table comfortably seats ten to twelve guests, all depending on how each place is set.

I’m a big fan of 48” round tables, which seat six to eight guests (although I think eight is too tight). They’re often used for the seating part of cocktail-style receptions, which are mostly stand-up affairs. I like using 48” round tables because you can carry on a conversations with everyone at the table, which you can’t do with either the 60” or 72” tables once the music starts.

A close second to 48″ round tables in conversational reach are rectangular tables, where a guest can comfortably speak with five of their neighbors, and sometimes more.

Location
Back to the venue itself. Just like in real estate, location matters: both in the larger sense, for example Baltimore vs. Chicago (or Mexico, for that matter), and in the more local sense of city, neighborhood, suburban, or rural. While you can’t expect to accommodate everyone in terms of convenience, you want to give some thought to your guests’ ability to get where you’re going, and the associated costs. 

Who Sits Where
I used to be a fan of open seating for wedding receptions. I’ve changed my mind over the years. Here’s why: weddings, by definition, bring people together from two people’s lives, many of whom may have never met. Both partners have immediate and extended families, old and new friends, and colleagues from their workplace. While you may have the impulse, honorable as it is, to help your guests meet new people and make new friends, your first responsibility is to make them comfortable. The easiest way to do that is to be sure that they are seated with people they already know and like. Provide your guests with a “home base” from which they can venture out, if they like, and to which they can return in comfort. 

Photo Credit: Bybrea.com

Guests of Honor
It’s also appropriate to seat your parents and grandparents in a place of honor, wherever that seems best at your reception. Even if you don’t assign seating for any of your other guests, this is always a good thing to do.

Assigned seating also avoids the mad rush for the best seats, not to mention the prospect of lone, single guests pitifully circling the room, looking for a place at a table where they’ll be comfortable. 

Getting Guests To Their Seats
There are several ways to help your guests find their seats. You can use escort cards, which gets guests to an open-seating table; or place cards, which gets guests to their assigned seat at a specific table. You can use individual cards to do that or an easy-to-read seating chart (Note: not all guests have young eyes!) keyed to table numbers or (your very clever) table names. 

Pro tip: Whichever method you use, it’s a good idea to lay out the numbered or named tables in a logical order, starting from the front of the room. Make it easy for your guests to find their table and their seat! 

Some small things:

Getting to the Wedding
Even though many guests use GPS for navigation, be a good host and provide written directions to your ceremony and reception venues. Make it even easier for your guests by including parking or valet information.

Managing Gifts
Guests sometimes arrive at wedding receptions with gifts, even though gifts should properly be sent to the marital home. No matter. Make it quick and easy for those guests to find where gifts are being collected or, even better, have someone at the door whose job it is to receive and manage gifts. The same is true with envelopes containing cards and cash or checks. 

Sharing the Food (and Drink) Menu
Let your guests know what they’re eating. Use attractive signage on hors d’oeuvres and buffet tables or stations, menu cards for seated-and-served meals, and be sure that servers know what’s in every hors d’oeuvres that they are passing.

It also doesn’t hurt to have a drink menu posted at the bar. Your guests will appreciate not having to ask about what’s available or to potentially be embarrassed by asking for something that isn’t. It will also make bar service go faster, which all of your guests will appreciate!

And, finally, back to…

Loving Your Guests
As you can see, there are lots ways to make planning a wedding that your guests will love, in Baltimore or wherever you are, simple and eas(ier).

We started by talking about two things: Bringing people together to participate in and celebrate the union of two people, and the couple offering hospitality to those participants. In ways big and small, you have many opportunities to provide hospitality to all of the wonderful people who come to celebrate your union. 

To borrow from the liturgical texts, it is right to give thanks and praise. Not, in this case, to God, but to the loving and yes, divine people in your life with whom you have chosen to share this important and intimate event in your life. You can, with care and consideration, make them feel as welcome at your wedding as they are in your heart.

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Chase Court owner David Egan has lived and breathed weddings for 22+ years! That means you get the knowledge, resources, and attention of a venue owner who has helped plan and execute over 900 weddings.

Visit chasecourt.com and follow @ChaseCourtWeddingVenue on Instagram, and check out our videos on YouTube!