The meal is often overlooked. It's the longest single block of your reception and the one most couples plan the least, because people are eating, so there's nothing to do, right? Wrong. First, the clock: a plated dinner with two courses runs about an hour, three courses about 75 minutes, a buffet 45 minutes to an hour, and every fifty guests over a hundred adds about ten minutes to any of those.

Keeping the room alive during it is a smaller job than it sounds: music you chose, an MC who keeps working, and one or two things that get your guests talking to each other instead of watching the kitchen door.

In the movie production, dinner is not the intermission. It's the scene where your guests finally sit still long enough to notice the room, the music, each other, and the two of you. So let's put a clock on it, then fill it.

HOW LONG DINNER REALLY TAKES

The service style sets the clock and the guest count stretches it. Plated, two courses: about 60 minutes. Three courses: about 75. A buffet: 45 to 60, and a single line adds ten minutes over a two-sided one. Stations run about an hour, family style around 50.

A buffet has one more rule. Somebody releases the tables, and that somebody is usually me: two or three at a time, the head table first, then the tables with grandparents, then the rest in an order the caterer and I agreed on beforehand, so the line never has forty people in it.

Give the Run of Show builder your dinner style and your guest count and it does the arithmetic I do in my head, table release order included.

BACKGROUND MUSIC IS NOT FILLER

The dinner music should be chosen by you, and it should be building toward the dancing, not killing time until it. The trick is volume and familiarity: loud enough to feel, low enough that a table can talk over it, and songs people know the words to from whatever decades your crowd grew up in. When a table starts singing along with a fork in the air, dinner is doing its job.

From the booth, this is where I read the room and shape the next twenty minutes around it. A DJ eating in the hallway with the music on shuffle is not doing that.

GETTING THE ROOM TALKING

Your guests should feel like part of the show, not an audience watching from the outside. A few that have worked for me over and over:

  • Words of wisdom cards. One card per person, the best advice for a long marriage, then each table picks its funniest or its wisest. I read the winners on the mic toward the end of the meal. Five minutes, and every table is talking to itself.
  • Future anniversary cards. A card on each table with a different year on the envelope; the table signs it, and it goes in with the gift cards for you to open years from now.
  • A game. A bean bag toss, a putting green, a hoop, with players picked from a list you made ahead of time. It never ceases to amaze me how much noise a room makes when someone sinks a bean bag from twenty feet.

The kissing games (a couples list, singing for a kiss) still work with plated service and a DJ who can fade the music out. They fall apart with a buffet or a band. Plenty of couples skip them now, and that's fine. Pick one or two from this list, not five. Too much of a good thing is still too much.

Two more things the meal decides for other people. Your providers eat when you eat, so they're back on their feet before the plates are cleared; Vendor Meals has the count and the where. And the seating chart is where you quietly take care of the guests who need a seat on the aisle, a table away from the speakers, or a clear path to the floor.

WHAT USUALLY GOES WRONG HERE

Toasts between courses that run long, so the kitchen holds the entrees and the whole night slides twenty minutes. A head table served last while the room waits. The cake brought out the second the plates are cleared (Cut The Cake covers why that cake goes home uneaten).

QUESTIONS I GET ASKED

Should the toasts happen during dinner?

Before it, in my experience. Toasts between courses hold the kitchen hostage, and one long speaker turns a 60-minute dinner into 80. The Toasts has the order I use.

When do we go around to the tables?

During the last course, not the first, or you'll never eat.

Can people dance during dinner?

In some rooms and some families, yes, from the first song. Most of the weddings I do around here wait for the floor to open after the cake and the parent dances. Tell me which you want and I build the meal around it.

Don't mistake dinner for filler music and a stretch where nothing can happen. Be bold, try new things, but as always, prepare ahead of time.

Thanks! Chuck