Not sure if anyone here has ever been to a Vietnamese/Chinese wedding before so will explain from the beginning. Apologies in advance for the long winded explanation ladies.
Our reception is being held at the traditional Chinese restaurant where we'll be having the standard 10 at each round table. The food is different obviously, but the way that it is served also changes the options of table layout. People are not given individual portions, instead a big humongous dish is served and everyone shares from the middle. One that dish is finished it will be replaced with another and another...till all 10 courses are thoroughly cleaned up!
First problem - Chinese people don't tend to have centrepieces as they get in the way of the food. If there are centrepieces they end up staying there for about half an hour before promptly being removed by waiters and replaced with food. This makes perfect sense to me but I'm worried that the room will look really bare with nothing on the tables. Obviously it'll be fine once food is on the table but won't it look dull? This is a picture I found on the internet of a different restaurant to show you what it looks like with nothing on the table but plates, bowls etc. In the middle are some bottles of wine. We'd have white table linen not the yellow.
Later on once the food is on the table it'll be like this
Again just a random picture I found online. So really there isn't space for any flowers or prettiness. People keep suggesting balloon in the middle and I have seen this at Chinese weddings. They just get snipped away just before the dinner starts and float up. But I really really really don't want balloons at my wedding.
So ladies what to do?
Second problem - we will have a table plan for everyone but this is causing headaches too. The menu will have things like lobster, roast duck...and like I said above the dish is shared in the middle of the table. So what do we do about vegetarians? We pay per table, so a full table of 10 costs us £600. However if we put a vegetarian on a meat table it means they will end up getting piddly portions of food and maybe not even a full 10 course variety as it will be too complicated for the chefs to separate it onto small dishes. And in doing so we still pay £60 for that person to be on that complete table as well as extra money for their vegetarian dishes. Does that make sense to everyone?
So what to do with the vegetarians? I can't put them all on the same table as they don't know each other and may not want to be separated form their partners. The other option was to have a buffet style table which is central to them that will have vegetarian food on and they will have to get up and serve themselves, but that seems like too much of a hassle for them to keep standing up to get more food.
Ahhh that's the end of it I think...
