DIY catering for June wedding.

lovemypug07

Hello,

I will be getting married in June 2014 and my fiance and I can not afford a caterer for a wedding with 200 people. We want to try to have a wonderful meal for all of our guests so I was wondering if anyone had ideas of how to have a fabulous yet inexpensive dinner for 200 people. We were thinking of going with costco and seeing if they could make the chicken and provide sides. What have you guys done, or what are you doing for your DIY catering? 

allispain

Have you considered having a local restaurant cater for you? Their prices are often much lower than your typical wedding caterer's - something like Mexican, Italian, BBQ, etc. usually works well.

I suggest this because self-catering creates a huge challenge in that you may not know how to handle food safety issues. You need to keep all of your food at the proper temperature to avoid health hazards, and that can be hard to do, especially for such a large gathering. 

mysticl

I want to second what PP said.  You need to be very careful not to make people sick.  Also, I've had meals catered by grocery stores, "wonderful" and "fabulous" are not words I would use to describe them.  

You have some time, check out various options for catering.  I think the restaurant idea is a great one.  Do you have a venue yet?  You might be able to rent out a restaurant for a relatively low price.