Communal eating is a wedding catering trend du jour, with the benefits being less waste, a more relaxed environment and the bonus of your guests mingling and mixing over broken bread. We’ve spoken to Ayse Ozdemir at Beautiful and the Feast (beautifulandthefeast.com) about why you should dare to share…
What do you see as the benefits of a sharing wedding feast?
“For us, there is no meal more important than the wedding breakfast; food is a standout element of our couples’ weddings,” says Ayse. “Eating communally naturally brings people together, encourages the sharing of more than just the meal and creates a more relaxed experience for everyone.
Big beautiful dishes curated to share get passed from friend to sibling to cousin to grandparent, akin to a big family meal. We want our couples and their guests to walk away feeling like they’ve been to the best dinner party ever, and creating these sharing feasts is our speciality.
Our dishes are thoughtfully designed to taste and look incredible, and their sharing style allows us to serve the wedding party much more seamlessly than individually plating. Encouraging guests to help themselves to the dishes on offer also allows them the choice to dine at their own leisure and be guided by their personal appetite and palate.”
How do you encourage couples to bring a personal dimension to their wedding feast?
“The wedding meal should also celebrate our couples’ journeys together, and we are always open to menu ideas and bespoke requests to help make their wedding meal extra special and personal.
In recent times, we have responded to briefs such as ‘beautiful food, everywhere’ – delivering decadent grazing tablescapes filled with dips, crudités, cured meats and fresh fruit. We’ve also created a Twix-themed brownie dessert, in keeping with an inside joke around how a groom proposed to his bride, and had stacks of Cornish fish finger sandwiches to keep guests dancing until the early hours!
Every year, we send out our menu for the coming season, along with an invitation for our couples to join us for a tasting, held at our sister restaurant, Temple, in Bude. This is a wonderful opportunity for us to all meet each other, and for our couples to sample a selection of the flavours and dishes they can expect from our new menu, in a cosy, relaxed dining setting.
It’s normally at this point that couples make final decisions on their wedding menu, after chatting through their wedding plans with us, and bring forward their bespoke flavours and requests for us to discuss together in person.”
Are there any recent wedding menus that really stand out to you?
“Our couples can generally expect our menus to celebrate inherently Mediterranean flavours with live fire techniques, and we find they naturally lend themselves to our sharing style. This cuisine truly savours and celebrates intense flavour, from smoky or sweet to citrusy and earthy, across meat, fish and vegetables.
Our wedding brochure is really a framework of vibrant, delicious dishes that our guests can pick and choose from, to build a wedding menu of their own. We really encourage our couples to curate their wedding menus themselves, so the menu changes from wedding to wedding, and can be really unique depending on the couple’s wishes! Some celebrate all things meat and fish, some are gloriously vegetarian, and some entirely vegan. Whatever a couple’s vision is for their wedding feast, we want to work with them to make it a reality.”
Do you have any signature dishes that always go down a treat?
“Across the board, our incredible smoky barbecued soy syrup pork belly bites with spicy habanero mayo always fly from our canapé trays, and our hake ceviche pani puri are the perfect mouthful of salty, sweet and fresh flavours.
Some popular starters include our beautifully presented burrata and anchovies with candy beetroot carpaccio and toasted seeds, and our classic charred carrots, harissa and warming cumin yoghurt.
Our braised beef shin, fig, pumpkin seed salsa and limed onion main is hearty and rich with flavour, and always goes down a treat accompanied by our trusty side of Cornish new potatoes and smoked butter, and our sweet and crunchy roasted new carrots, tarragon and hazelnuts.
We love to create a showstopping dessert, and our raspberry ricotta cake, with beautifully bright pink hibiscus cream and fresh mint is no exception. Piled high and decorated, it is a thing of delight and joy.”
What underpins the ethos of Beautiful and the Feast?
“We grew our business with honesty and integrity; in all that we do, we keep our focus firmly on how we impact our environment and community. We source as much of our produce as possible from small local growers and suppliers, and friends. We aim for flavours to be at their peak, and our produce is harvested precisely for us, to allow us to serve our couples a menu harmonious with the exact time and season that they have chosen to get married.
Everything we serve has been made by our very hands, using traditional techniques and modern flavours, and delivered with immense love for our ingredients and flavours, and strong attention to detail.
We have a never-ending supply of creative energy that feeds our daily practices and informs our futures – we are currently putting together a travelling bar and looking into astoundingly beautiful linen offerings!
