A vegetarian wedding menu for guests who also eat meat

Plenty of families hold a vegetarian wedding for guests who do not eat vegetarian food the rest of the week. The menu that fails is the one that treats vegetarian as a subtraction: the same banquet list, minus the meat, with paneer standing in everywhere. The menu that works treats it as its own cuisine with a very wide range.

Lead with texture, not substitutes

What a guest misses at a vegetarian meal is rarely the meat itself. It is crunch, char, smoke and something to work at with their hands. Vegetables off a grill, something fried to order, breads coming hot off a griddle, a dish with real chilli heat: these do the job that a substitute never does. A menu built from three curries and rice will feel thin however good each dish is.

Where live counters earn their place

At a reception, counters solve the mixed-guest problem better than any single dish. A chaat counter gives everyone something to do in the first half hour. A griddle or a tawa gives them food that arrives hot in their hand. A wok gives the room heat and noise. A dessert counter at the end sends people home talking about the food rather than about what was missing from it.

Counters also spread the room out, which matters more at a wedding than at any other event, because everyone arrives at once.

Keep the dishes the family expects

Whatever else changes, the dishes that belong to your family go on the menu first, cooked properly. Write them down and give them to the caterer at the enquiry stage. Everything else can be planned around them.

Range is the point

A vegetarian menu can move between South Indian, North Indian and global cooking in a way that a meat menu rarely does, because nothing has to be built around a protein. Use that. One part of the menu can be entirely traditional and another can be a counter nobody expected, without either one looking out of place.

What to brief your caterer

• The dishes that must be there, by name.
• How many guests, and how they will arrive.
• What your guests can and cannot eat, so the caterer can say plainly what they can do before you commit.
• Whether the venue allows open flame, which decides whether a grill or a tandoor is possible.
• Which parts of the evening you most want people to remember, so the counters go there.

RASA serves vegetarian food only. No meat is served at any RASA event. Tell us what your guests need when you enquire and we will tell you plainly what we can do for your event.

Read next

• Weddings and receptions
• The live stations
• The five collections