Something borrowed, something blue, something … deep-fried? | Canada Voices

For Calgary wedding planner Megan Sawchuk, walking into a reception venue at 10:30 p.m. with an armload of late-night provisions is like casting a spell on the dance floor.

Heads swivel to locate the source of the bewitching aroma. After jubilant cheers, the crowd files off to follow her.

“Just give us five minutes!” she’ll holler and then get to work, quickly arranging the McDonald’s haul: hamburgers, cheeseburgers and a giant bowlful of fries. Then the mob descends.

It doesn’t matter how fussy or high-end the plated dinner served hours earlier was: Guests always have the same frenzied reaction.

A decade and a half ago, the late-night wedding snack was a rare novelty. But for some couples, it’s become a standard line item in the budget. Wedding planners and caterers in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver say that anywhere from “at least half” to all the couples they work with have opted for one.

These nighttime noshes serve as fuel for those who have been dancing – and/or drinking – for a few hours and have worked up an appetite since dinner. But they’ve also increasingly become a way for couples to add a personal touch without breaking the bank.

“Dinner is always something nice and refined … but there’s something about late-night snacks that is always comforting and nostalgic,” says Jasmine Thoo, executive chef and owner of Coastal Kitchen, a catering and event planning company in Vancouver.

During the menu-planning process, when she’s getting to know couples’ personalities and preferences, a soon-to-be bride or groom will sometimes share tidbits about what foods they like to eat while drinking. If it’s Kraft Dinner, Thoo will do up a station with the saucy noodles, garnished with bacon bits. Other times she’ll serve kebab, a nod to the popular 1 a.m. snack often enjoyed by twentysomethings after a night of clubbing.

“To bring that to a wedding – which is often friends from your college years and people that you grew up with – I think that really unlocks a lot of memories for people,” she says.

Thoo says guests at the weddings she caters often forget the carefully crafted three-course dinner, but fondly remember the midnight snack. Some have even booked her for their celebrations as a result.

Lately, clients have been gravitating toward what Thoo says are “trashy chic” options. At one recent wedding, she served McDonald’s chicken nuggets with crème fraîche and caviar. At another, she rigged up a one-metre-tall “queso waterfall” filled with five litres of liquid cheese and surrounded by tortilla chips guests could use for dipping.

Bringing out the right food at the right moment can be as crucial as playing the right songs in the right order at a wedding reception.

A typical wedding day might begin with an early afternoon ceremony and then go to a cocktail hour, dinner, cake cutting and dancing. After 10 hours, guests’ energy levels are flagging, Thoo says.

“When the late-night snack rolls out, there seems to be this reinvigoration that happens with the party.”

Five years ago, when Vahini Rasagulenthiran launched her wedding planning business, kottu roti – a popular Sri Lankan street food – was a common late-night snack choice among her primarily Tamil clients, who span Ontario and parts of the northeastern United States.

Seeing a chef preparing it fresh makes for a fun spectacle, but the dish – which consists of chopped flatbread fried with meat, vegetables and spices – is filling and hard to consume standing up.

“They’ve got to sit down and eat and it really does kill the whole vibe. And then nobody’s on the dance floor,” she says. It also proved wasteful: A lot of food was thrown out at the end of the night.

She now steers clients toward finger foods such as fried chicken, French fries and mini sliders, which guests can easily eat with one hand while getting down to whatever the DJ is playing.

In about 80 per cent of the weddings she books, the event caterers will set up a snack station a few hours after they’ve cleared dinner plates, Rasagulenthiran says. The rest of the time, couples will prebook a massive order from Taco Bell, KFC or McDonald’s. For a 700-person wedding (the average size she handles), they’ll order enough for 300 people. Relative to the dinner budget, it’s a not-too-expensive add-on.

Low-cost but unique was exactly what Zara Contractor Bodhanwala and her husband, Farhad, were looking for in Vancouver last year. After splurging on the plated dinner for their 120 wedding guests (a choice between short ribs, steelhead trout and risotto), they wanted a late-night snack that was cheap, easy “and felt authentic to us,” Contractor Bodhanwala says.

Farhad is obsessed with instant noodles, so the couple decided on a ramen station.

They set out about 90 packages of instant ramen and instant macaroni and cheese bought at their local grocery store. (The venue provided a hot water dispenser.) Contractor Bodhanwala, a graphic designer, had affixed custom labels to each package and to the sets of chopsticks and bottles of soy sauce, sesame oil and chili crisp that were provided, alongside toppings such as cilantro and boiled eggs.

She watched with delight as some of her uncles mingled while eating bowls of ramen and a gaggle of children tucked into containers of macaroni and cheese.

All the effort put into the labels proved worthwhile in the days after the wedding, when many of Contractor Bodhanwala’s visiting family members were still in town.

“It sort of became a joke that people were just like, ‘Oh, we’re hungry, we’re gonna take the wedding noodles,’” she says. “It’s kind of cute – it became this lasting memory.”