18 February 2026

The relentless drudgery of wedding food

It doesn’t have to be like this!

Photo by Victoria Rich / Millennium Images, Uk

I am writing this column with the mental acuity of a sloth on Lexapro. This has nothing to do with the 17,000 glasses of white Burgundy I drank at my best friend’s wedding yesterday – but thanks for checking. It was a Thursday afternoon in Islington and 16 of us crowded into Chapel Market Kitchen for lunch. We stayed for eight hours.

There really is a lot to dislike about the traditional Anglophone wedding. White, for example, is an unflattering colour – better suited to Victorian ghosts and the viceroy of India than the young women currently populating the northern hemisphere. I find the continued use of the term “wedding breakfast” an irritating bourgeois contrivance. And I’m sorry to ask, but is all of this pomp just in service of the corporate slickers down at the ugly-hat factory? Nowhere do the English dress worse than to observe their child’s marriage.

Somehow more off-putting than any of that is the catering. I do not know how many more ducks have to die in the service of this ghastly industry. But by the end of the wedding “season” I suspect I will have a bite force equivalent to a saltwater crocodile, what with all the chewing and masticating and slabs of overcooked flesh. Weddings seem to scramble the senses of people with otherwise good taste. This is lunch from the imagination of Hyacinth Bucket: mashed potatoes, no – sorry, pommes purée; salmon en croûte; “jus”. Enough!

And here is the thing: some food is just not suitable for mass production. If I told you I was considering serving 70 omelettes to my wedding guests, you would be right to call me a fool. After that? Individual cuts of meat might be the hardest to cook, time and serve for a crowd. And yet, wedding caterers intrepidly march into the world and fail to thwart the laws of thermodynamics by cooking fish for 120 in a village hall. That’s 120 wasted lives.

And then there is the ceremony – plodding, leaden, delivered by a vicar who will not remember the couple’s names or faces in an hour’s time. The small talk – awkward and neverending. The speeches – invariably delivered by friends with no experience, aptitude or instinct for public speaking. And the band – well, if they were good, they wouldn’t be here, would they?

But I have wonderful news for you. None of this is mandatory. There is no wedding commissar, no legal requirement to serve squeaky green beans and mini quiches. You will not be taken out back and shot if you eschew iced fruitcake in favour of something edible. I know this because I experienced it myself yesterday – as I watched two friends get married in Islington Town Hall, followed by lunch in a real restaurant with cooks who really know what they are doing. No one was forced to listen to Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” against their will.

We sat around plates of sardines swimming in bright, peppery olive oil; cucumber salad and labneh; octopus on toast. We drank Burgundy far too nice for a school night and allowed ourselves just a few cigarettes. We shared tuna steaks and passed around huge plates of pasta. The anchovies with vanilla butter were one of the few genuinely original things I have eaten this side of the New Year. I only knocked over one bottle of wine. I do not know if there is such a thing as a perfect meal but I can tell you that CMK can take you pretty well most of the way there.

I look around and see the couple’s parents, a few childhood friends, others picked up later in life – this lunch is convivial, warm and small, and I couldn’t really want to be anywhere else at 4.45pm on a Thursday in a February monsoon. The ill-tempered disposition usually on display in these pages was nowhere to be found, or – at the absolute least – I would have to dig very deep to find it.

But, more than that, I look over and see two people who really want to be married to one another. Huh, I thought – I really would chew on grizzly steak for an eternity in hell for just five more minutes here. Luckily it will not come to that: the beef at Chapel Market Kitchen is perfectly cooked.

[Further reading: Tony Blair is old Labour now]