Weddingbee boards

I agree with ynichole - I hadn't explicitly heard the 6 - 8 pieces per person rule, but as I look at how many of each of our choices our caterer calculated, it comes out to about 8 pieces per person.  I have been to weddings that had fantastic food, and although I do remember that, I also remember that the hors d'oeuvres were all gone 20 minutes into the cocktail hour, which was not good.  I would also second that if you want to save money, or are just worried about having too much food, you can offer people either soup or salad (both are probably not necessary).

Our caterer seem to use a complicated relationship between how long our cocktail "hour" actually is, the amount of food we were serving for dinner (that's where your courses come in), the time of day, and the actual hors d'ouevres we chose to come up with his estimate of what we would need.  We are getting three cold and three hot hors d'ouevres, and I know that in general the cold pieces are smaller than the hot ones.  So really, I suppose it depends to some degree.  I do know that as we added and changed selections, he kept changing the amounts required.  Basically it looks like we have 1 piece of each hot per person, and 1.5 pieces of each cold.  For lunch I would not think you would need as much as for dinner, as lunch is generally a lighter meal.  (But then, I'm not a caterer.  My caterer and pastry chef seem to have a lot of seemingly arcane knowledge concerning how much of what actually gets eaten and when, so I am basically trusting them.)

Mrs Pomegranate, we were exactly the opposite - we fell in love with too many of the selections.  My mom insisted three options would be enough, and honestly it probably would be.  But we loved the smoked duck in pastry with a maple and red pepper sauce, and we loved the smoked salmon pate, and we loved the fabulous little little spicy beef skewers, and you have to have fantastic cheeses, and you can totally see where this is going.  (Maybe we should have had lunch before we talked with the caterer, rather than after.)  Anyway, the caterer said no problem, twice as many selections, half as many pieces.  As apparently its really the number of pieces.  FI reminds me that the caterer said that people will normally put 4 - 6 pieces on a plate at one time, nobody will actually have one of everything, some people will have two of one thing but hardly anybody will have three or more.  About 1/3 of the people will go back for a second plate if the cocktail hour is long enough. (How does he remember this stuff?)  We are not passing trays, we are just having a station at each end of the room, so I have no idea how that factors into the equation.

Maybe your friends just had too much of each thing?  You don't say what time the wedding was, but maybe it was not long enough after lunch?  Or maybe a little too long, such that people had a little smackerel of something before coming.  But I guess according to our caterer if the you have ordered aobut 60 pieces of each selection, then you have about 7 pieces per person.  Think about one of each on a small plate, and if it seems like too much, then you probably need less.  Maybe eliminate one selection, or cut the order back to 50 pieces of each selection.