Why are your friends and family coming to your wedding? Though you may harbor suspicions about a few guests’ motivations, I can guarantee you that none are coming to have an unforgettable culinary experience. But when wedding-planning, it is all too easy to forget this, and to start behaving as though your goal is to serve the gustatory experience of a lifetime. But trying to compete with the 5-star restaurants is a losing game. Frustration, tears, disappointment and broken banks are sure to follow.

Fortunately, all of this is avoidable.  Just keep reminding yourselves that your friends and family are there to share your special day, not to have the meal of their life.  Sure, sharing tasty food with your loved ones is a great way to celebrate and share your joy. And luckily, tasty food is easy to provide, and a worthy goal to aim for when planning the menu for your wedding.

My wife and I have been to many weddings with tasty food. They’ve been held in a lot of different environments and with a range of budgets. We’ve celebrated marriages in national parks where friends barbecued; in an Italian restaurant with pasta and sides served in big, white bowls, family-style. We’ve eaten at reception halls with buffet-style meals and halls with the traditional sit-down dinner with service, where we checked off whether we wanted fish or chicken. We’ve been to weddings that served cake for dessert, and others that served cupcakes, donuts, and a dessert bar of pies. And though neither of has been to a wedding pot-luck, we think it’s a good idea–everyone bringing their best dish has got to make for a good meal. But this could be difficult to pull off when you’re inviting a large number and have to coordinate a lot of different people and foods.

For our wedding, we opted for a buffet with Indian food from one of our favorite restaurants.  Not only was going the buffet-route far cheaper than a sit-down meal, we liked that it let us serve a wide variety of foods that each guest could pick and choose according to their tastes and dietary restrictions. And instead of waiting for food to be served to them, our guests got to mingle with each other in the buffet-line—something we wanted.

Whatever you decide to do, here’s some guidelines that can help you serve up some tasty, reasonably-priced food:

If you can help it, don’t use the “W” word before getting a quote. Saying it’s a wedding makes the prices go up. Way up.

If you want to save more money, avoid professional “preferred” caterers and wedding caterers. Often they pay money to be on the “preferred” lists, and make up for it by charging you more. We avoided this by visiting restaurants whose food we liked and asked if they could cater an event for 150 people. One of the places we considered said they could, but the largest event they had catered in the past had only been for 50 guests. So we decided against risking finding out whether they really could scale up to our size and went with one that was used to doing big parties.

Be sure to ask whether the caterers will be providing tables, linens, glassware, etc. The restaurant we went with provided the food without any problem, but could only provide disposable dishes, glasses and silverware for a party of our size.  Given our environmental and aesthetic qualms about using disposable wares, as well as the fact that we were going to have to rent tables and chairs from a party supply service anyway, we chose to rent dishes, glasses and silverware from the supply store as well.  Even with this added cost, our per-guest price was way way cheaper than the prices charged by full-service wedding caterers.

Consider going with food that reflects your cultural heritage. Ethnic food is often inexpensive and tasty even when made in big quantities, so it makes for a great buffet. My wife is Texan, so we briefly considered barbeque, but decided that there were going to be too many vegetarians for that to work out. Indian food was a natural choice for us given my heritage, as well as the fact that most of our friends and family enjoy it. The other good thing about Indian food is that it does not have to come fresh off the stove in order to taste good.  In fact, it usually tastes better the day after you cook it. This made it perfect for the buffet-style service we wanted.

Plan for leftover food. Our guests enjoyed the food we had at our wedding, as did we.  In fact, they enjoyed it so much that we kind of wished we’d made arrangements to donate leftover food to a soup kitchen or provided take-out containers as favors. When you serve a lot of people, we learned the hard way, there are going to be leftovers, and a lot of our food got thrown out.

But even though we received many compliments on how good the food was, I can guarantee you that if you asked any of our guests to list the best meals they’ve ever had, it’s extremely unlikely that our wedding meal (or any other wedding meal) will come close to making that list.  That’s just fine.

So, buck the wedding industry and bon appétit!