Cocktail Style Wedding Catering

A cocktail style wedding takes advantage of appetizers in all forms to create a fun interactive event with a lot of mingling and small group conversation. The cocktail style format allows for loose groups to form and people to interact freely without the confines of seating chart, table arrangements, and high centerpieces. It's a flexible approach that can be used in a lot of different contexts: sometimes it means you have a more interactive wedding. Sometimes it is used as a reception for things like elopements or destination weddings, where the wedding has already taken place. Sometimes it's an approach that allows for more people to fit within a room that wouldn't fit them if it had tables and chairs.

At 440 Elm, we have a facility with multiple rooms and large spaces to comfortably spread out. A cocktail hour or cocktail style approach allows guests to move from wedding ceremony into a flowing conversation in multiple spaces including our courtyard and garden outside and the Parlor and Foyer inside.

Our Approach to Hosting and Catering Cocktail Style Weddings

We love appetizers! We can have fun with passed appetizers, displayed appetizers, paired signature cocktails, action stations, and all kinds of elements in the cocktail hour that traditionally follows a wedding ceremony.

We suggest doing a few things to break the ice if the wedding contains a few different groups that are less familiar with each other

1. Allocate a few people in the wedding party as "hosts". Make it their job to know the guest list and make introductions as well as engage and warm up some of the shy people
2. Create ground rules on interaction to break up cliques. Some of my favorite include an expectation to leave an open space in any group circle (a pacman) ask people joining a conversation to allow existing conversations to continue