About three years ago, Meera Singh, a marketing professional from Dehradun, and Arjun Sahay, a tech entrepreneur whose family is from Chennai, built the menu at their Jaipur wedding around the places and experiences that had shaped their relationship. The meal moved from Kumaoni raita and pahadi mutton—a nod to Singh’s childhood in Uttarakhand—to Chettinad-inspired small plates reflecting Sahay’s roots in Tamil Nadu. Desserts included patishapta and bebinca, inspired by trips the couple took to Kolkata and Goa during their years together.
“Every dish came with a short note explaining its significance to us,” says Singh. “We wanted guests to understand our story through the food. It turned the dinner into a slice of our lives rather than just a feast.” The couple spent almost three months discussing the finer details with Mumbai-headquartered Blue Sea Catering.
Something like this would have been unthinkable in India’s luxury wedding circuit a decade ago. Today, however, families are just as likely to seek out a street-food vendor or a regional specialist as they are a celebrity chef.
The grand buffet, once the centrepiece of wedding hospitality, is slowly giving way to more specialised culinary experiences rooted in regional cuisines, personal histories and singular food stories. “The days of having 100 dishes, metres and metres of long buffets are long gone,” says Ritu Dalmia, celebrity chef, restaurateur and co-owner of DIVA Catering.
“Today it is all about less is more. Lesser-known regional foods like Bihari and Manipuri are being requested often, and so are Chilean and other Latin American cuisines.” She adds, “My next aim is to take the ros omelette guy from the Mapusa bus station for our next wedding.”
RISE OF THE MICRO CONCEPT
The desire to personalise wedding menus has also reshaped how those menus are executed. One of the biggest developments in luxury wedding catering is the rise of micro concepts—specialised experiences built around a chef, restaurant, artisan, cuisine or even a single iconic dish.
Rather than asking one caterer to execute dozens of cuisines, families are bringing in specialists known for doing one thing exceptionally well. At Mumbai-based luxury catering venture Sage & Saffron, this can mean anything from a chef’s-table-style dinner to a restaurant takeover or a highly focused food station.
Dalmia has taken the idea to remarkable lengths. For a wedding in Udaipur earlier this year, she brought in nonnas or grandmothers from Puglia in southern Italy to make handmade pasta. “They did not speak a word of English, and getting them to come and work with our team was one of the biggest challenges,” she recalls. “But they won the hearts of everyone.” The guests watched and waited for their turn as the nonnas kneaded the dough and hand-rolled the pasta right in front of them.
More recently, she collaborated with acclaimed Peruvian chef Pia León of Kjolle, Bangkok’s celebrated Bo.lan and pastry chef Renne Frank, adapting their restaurant philosophies for an Indian wedding in Marrakech. The team has also flown in chefs from the award-winning Chinese restaurant Hutong for a wedding celebration in Delhi.
Foodlink Luxury Catering, the Mumbai-based company that has catered high-profile celebrations, including the weddings of Deepika Padukone-Ranveer Singh and Anant Ambani-Radhika Merchant, has witnessed a similar appetite for specialised experiences. “Lately we’ve been asked to recreate a specific city’s street-food legend, build royal Thai counters and set up live patisserie experiences,” says founder, chairman and managing director Sanjay Vazirani. “The brief earlier was ‘impress them’, now it’s ‘move them’.”
STREET FOOD GOES LUXE
For all the talk of Michelin-starred chefs and international restaurant collaborations, some of the most sought-after wedding food experiences today come from much closer home. The trend was on display during the Ambani wedding celebrations in 2024, where food vendors became attractions in their own right. Varanasi institution Kashi Chaat Bhandar was flown in to Mumbai to serve their iconic tamatar chaat, while Jaipur’s Pandit Ji Vade Wale and Indore’s JMB Catering brought their signature double-decker dahi vadas and garadu chaat, respectively.
Vazirani says such requests have become increasingly common. He has had families insist on bringing in their favourite vada pav stall from their college days, the halwai their grandmother swore by or a dish from their own neighbourhood.
The challenge, however, lies in scaling those flavours without losing their essence. “A vendor accustomed to serving a few hundred customers a day must cater to thousands without compromising flavour, texture or authenticity,” says Vazirani.
A MENU OF MEMORIES
Increasingly, chefs begin planning wedding menus by asking couples a simple question: what role has food played in their relationship? The answers are often surprisingly specific.
At Sage & Saffron in Mumbai, one couple spoke about south Indian breakfasts and their holidays in Thailand. That conversation eventually found its way on to the menu as Chettinad-style prawns finished with a lemongrass glaze. Another couple from Mumbai said their favourite rainy-day ritual was going for a drive and eating bhutta. The team transformed it into a baby corn version with corn mousse and chilli salt.
“It depends on the couple and what they expect of the food,” says Akshat Agarwal, business head at Sage & Saffron. “Some couples want to give their loved ones a glimpse into their love story through the menu.”
At Mumbai’s Gallops, chef Yajush Malik recently worked on a wedding where the bride was from Assam and the groom was Sindhi. Family recipes like masor tenga and ghuti aloo were made using ingredients flown in from Assam, while familiar Sindhi flavours appeared in contemporary forms—koki, dahi and achaar as canapés, sai bhaji as arancini, and Sindhi mutton reimagined as roast lamb with garam masala jus.
Chef Manu Chandra, founder-partner of Manu Chandra Enterprise that owns the bespoke catering company Single Thread, has taken the concept even further. For a Chennai couple, he designed a multi-course dinner inspired by the places they had lived in, travelled to and eaten together—from a favourite momo shop in Chennai to hawker stalls in Singapore. At another wedding where the theme was “Street food, reimagined”, the menu included burrata and marinated cherry tomatoes chaat, chicken keema and green peas served with truffle buttered mini pav, and braised lamb nihari paired with pearl barley khichdi. “People will carry that for a long, long time,” says Chandra. “There is greater memory association and more tangibility in what the event was all about.” In his view, people want something familiar but with twists and surprises.
In a country as vast and diverse as India, there is room for both spectacle and storytelling. “The wedding market is a very, very large market,” says Chandra. “There will always be giant weddings with tons of décor and food. The one-upmanship game will continue as long as wealth keeps getting created.”
Abundance isn’t going anywhere. Families will continue to fly in celebrity chefs and build elaborate food halls, and a growing number of couples are taking a more active role in shaping the dining experience on their special day.
“I quite enjoy the ones where the couple feel invested in being able to curate something genuinely warm and special,” he adds. “Those are the types of meals and events that guests take with them for a long time.”
Destination weddings have accelerated this trend. According to Agarwal, couples are increasingly looking beyond hotel banquet menus and drawing from the culinary identity of the place where they are celebrating. A wedding in Rajasthan might feature a local kachori specialist, while one in Kerala could showcase dosas and rasam made by a beloved institution.
The question is no longer how much food a wedding can offer, but what that food has to say. “The dishes that sparked the most conversation were the ones with a personal connection,” says Singh. “Those were the flavours people remembered long after the wedding.”
Geetika Sachdev is a Delhi-based lifestyle journalist.