Planning
Self-catering a wedding: what the kitchen has to do
5 min read · Published August 28, 2026
The short answer
Only if the venue lets you into the kitchen and the kitchen can hold and reheat food for your guest count. The limits in practice are fridge space, oven space and dishwashing throughput — not cooking skill. Ask what appliances there are, how fast the dishwasher cycles, whether you are handed the keys, and who washes up, before you plan a single dish.
Around here, families cook. Fowl suppers, funeral lunches, wedding receptions — somebody's aunt has done it for two hundred people and would do it again. The question is never whether you can cook for your own wedding. It is whether the building will let you.
The three limits that decide it
Not skill. These:
1. Cold storage
You are holding food for 150 people for most of a day. A domestic fridge will not do it. Ask how many fridges there are and whether they are empty on the day. Here: two, and they are yours.
The common failure is salads and desserts, not the main. The main goes in the oven; forty trays of dessert have to live somewhere until nine o'clock.
2. Reheat capacity
Almost nobody cooks a wedding supper from raw on site. What actually happens is that food is cooked in the days before and reheated on the day — so the real question is how much you can bring up to temperature at once, and whether you can hold it there.
A single domestic stove will reheat for about 60. Past that you are borrowing roasters, and roasters need outlets. Count the outlets.
3. Dishwashing
The one everyone forgets, and the one that ruins the night. One hundred and fifty place settings is 150 plates, 150 side plates, 150 sets of cutlery, 150 glasses and 150 cups. A domestic dishwasher runs about an hour a load and holds maybe twelve settings.
That is a twelve-hour job on one machine.
Here: one commercial dishwasher, and its wash and rinse cycle is two minutes. That is not a difference of degree, it is a different job. The limit stops being the machine and becomes how fast people can scrape plates and load racks — and people you can add.
What this kitchen has
Plainly, so you can plan against it:
- Two fridges
- One commercial dishwasher — two-minute wash and rinse
- Stove
- Microwave
- Coffee maker and a serving thermos
- Dishes and cutlery for the full room, included
And the keys. There is no in-house caterer here, so there is nobody to protect the kitchen from you.
The middle path most people take
Full self-catering and full catering are not the only options, and the split below is what we see work most often:
- A caterer does the hot main. It is the part with the most risk and the least joy.
- The family does the salads, the buns and the dessert table. It is the part people actually want to have made, and it travels well.
- Somebody who is not in the wedding party runs the kitchen on the day. Non-negotiable. It cannot be the mother of the bride and it cannot be you.
- Somebody is on the dishes, in writing, before the day. Nobody here washes up for you. Either a caterer's staff stay for it, or you roster two people a shift from eight o'clock and mean it.
Anna's All Occasions has cooked in this kitchen and knows where everything is, which shortens that conversation by an hour. You are not obliged to use them or anyone.
Coffee and tea at $2.75 a head, and late-night coffee and squares at $4.50, are the two lines self-catered weddings add most often. Price them against your real guest count here.
A realistic timeline
- Two days before — shopping done, anything that can be cooked ahead is cooked and in the fridges. Confirm who is in the kitchen and when.
- The day before — food into the fridges, room decorated, nothing left for the morning. There is no day-before access to buy here: the day before is yours because you booked it, or it is not yours at all. A Friday on its own is $1,000 and the Friday-to-Sunday weekend is $2,500. For a self-catering couple it is the best money on the whole list.
- Morning of — the building is yours from 7 AM. Trays out, oven on in stages, someone assigned to the coffee and nothing else.
- Through supper — the kitchen runner runs the kitchen. The couple are not in it.
- From 8 PM — the dishwasher starts and does not stop. Two people on it, one racking and one unloading, swapped out every hour so nobody is still there at midnight.
- Next morning — cleaning, either yours or ours for $250.
The honest warning
Self-catering saves real money — often two or three thousand dollars at 150 guests. It costs a day of somebody's life, and if that somebody is the couple or their parents, they will remember the kitchen instead of the wedding.
Spend some of what you saved on somebody to run the room and somebody to run the dishes. That is the version of this that people are glad they did.
