French Food

The first thing you should know if you’re planning to serve French food for your wedding is that you will need a pretty solid budget. Once you got this out of the way (we’ll go over pricing later), it’s time to think about your menu and because French cuisine is pretty sophisticated, you really have lots of options available. In the end, everything will be based on how fancy you want your menu to be! The one thing that is important though is making sure you found a catering company whose chef is actually French – trust me there are too many clueless chefs coming out culinary schools who wrongly think they can cook French food!

SERVICE

Contrary to other foods, this one will be easy: if you want to serve French food at your wedding, you will need to spend extra bucks on waiters as serving gourmet food buffet-style will ruin the good impression you are trying to make; of course you could argue that you can find French food at buffets – for examples at Las Vegas’ Paris hotel – but it’s no classy experience.

MENU IDEAS

Your choice of appetizers will pretty much depend on your budget. You can serve something simple like a salad with warm goat cheese or calamari’s. A little pricier, you can offer a charcuterie platter usually composed of saucisson (like salami but way better), smoked ham, paté and cornichons. But if you want something more luxurious, I would recommend Fois Gras or even smoked salmon.

When it comes to entrees, you can go with something easy like chicken cordon bleu but I would recommend a steak, which can come with various sauces (pepper, tartar, blue cheese & more). As a side thin “allumette” fries, vegetables, mushrooms or potatoes gratin will be a good match. A nice piece of fish such as salmon will also work.

The French always have cheese before dessert so you will need to present a nice platter of cheese with some good artisan bread. Be warned that cheese can be pretty expensive and if you want to do things well, you can’t use cheap, tasteless cheese. I would suggest serving at least Brie or Camembert (stronger taste as more fermented) with Roquefort (blue cheese – Société Roquefort is popular but average, Papillon Roquefort is way better) , goat cheese (plain, no herbs or add-ons) and Emmental or Gruyere. These are your basic cheeses and it will already be a bit pricey but you can spend even more on more sophisticated cheeses such as Epoisse, Munster, Roblochon and more. Just make sure you buy actual French cheese, no Canadian, Spanish or Dutch cheeses please!

Finally, you can also get an authentic French wedding cake which is usually a Croquembouche made with choux pastries and caramel. You can, in addition, serve Macarons to complement the cake.

Regarding alcohol, it also depends on how far you want to go budget-wise. First, the French usually have an aperitif before eating: Kir (cassis with Champagne) seems appropriate for a wedding but any cocktail will do. Then you need to serve French wine during the meal but keep in mind that you will need to change wines depending on the course – for example white wines go with fish while strong red wines go with red meat. Same thing with desserts that you can pair with some sweater wine if you want to serve something else than Champagne. Finally, the French also drink a “digestif” (supposedly to digest!) after eating – think something strong, liquorish or eau-de-vie (Armagnac, Cognac or Calvados will do).

As for the Champagne, pick a bottle that says Champagne to make sure you get the real thing (starting around $30 a bottle) or another acceptable option is picking a French brand which produces its own version of Champagne here here – for example Mum. That said, stay away from anything cheaper than $10 a bottle if you want something drinkable.

PRICES

If after reading all of this, you haven’t fallen from you chair, you probably already figured it out it will cost you a lot of money: your starting price, without the alcohol and cake, should be around $70. As for the alcohol, it will depend on how many wines and spirits you want to serve as well as the brands and types.