The queue at the chaat counter is twenty-five minutes long. The paneer on the main buffet has been sitting since 8:15 and has gone stiff. Four hundred people ate; three hundred are still waiting. Somebody’s father is angry, and he is angry at you, because you are the planner.
The food is fine. It was fine at the tasting and it is fine now. The problem is throughput, and throughput was decided in a contract nobody read closely.
The caterer’s team arrived at 4pm to set up. The venue has one working kitchen line and a gas connection sized for a restaurant, not for 700 covers. So most of the cooking is happening on temporary burners in the parking area, which everyone knew and nobody costed.
Two of the eight service staff didn’t show. Nobody ate lunch because staff meals weren’t in the quote.
What to ask, months before: what is the kitchen infrastructure at my specific venue, what are you bringing, and how many service staff are in the contract by name and number? A caterer who has worked that venue before will answer in thirty seconds. One who hasn’t will say it’ll be fine.
You told them 700. About 520 will actually eat, which is normal — Indian wedding RSVPs run 20–30% optimistic and everyone in the business knows it.
You will pay for 700, because the contract has a guaranteed minimum plate count and it is set at the number you said out loud in a good mood.
This is where the money actually leaks. Per-plate rate is not the price. The price is:
plate rate × guaranteed minimum × (service charge + GST) + live counters + staff meals + setup and transport
Ask for that number, landed, as one figure. A caterer who won’t produce it is a caterer whose final bill will surprise you.
Six of you sat down and ate very good food.
That food was cooked by the head chef, for six plates, with unlimited time. On the wedding night, 700 plates come out of a temporary kitchen run by a brigade that may be partly subcontracted, at the pace the queue demands.
The tasting tells you whether they can cook. It tells you almost nothing about whether they can serve.
Better questions at the tasting:
Question 4 is the one that works. Planners maintain relationships with vendors; families have no reason to protect anyone.
This is the part where a post like this normally hands you a ranked top-ten and pretends it’s authoritative.
I’m not going to, because I’d be lying. I run homestays, not a catering company. I have watched caterers load in and out of properties around Mohali and Zirakpur for years, which tells me a lot about how teams operate and nothing reliable about how their food tastes at 700 covers.
So here is what’s honestly available: the names that come up consistently across WedMeGood, Sulekha, Justdial and WeddingWire listings for Mohali and the wider Tricity.
Treat that as a call list, not a ranking. I have not eaten at any of these weddings and neither has any other blog that ranks them.
On the prices: directory listings across the Tricity run from roughly ₹600 to over ₹3,000 per plate, and those “starting from” numbers are close to meaningless — they’re the cheapest possible veg menu at the highest possible headcount, quoted to win a click. Use them to sort caterers into rough tiers. Do not use them to build a budget.
A Mohali wedding is rarely one meal. It’s mehendi lunch, haldi breakfast, sangeet dinner, the wedding, and often a next-morning breakfast for whoever hasn’t left.
One caterer across all of it gets you volume pricing and a team that learns your venue. It also gets you a team that is exhausted by the main night, which is the one that matters.
Splitting — a big caterer for the wedding, someone small and local for the daytime functions — costs more on paper and often runs better. There isn’t a correct answer. There is only a decision, and it should be a deliberate one made early, not a discount you accepted in March.
Only in one narrow way, and I’d rather be straight about the size of it.
Guests staying in homes rather than a hotel block have kitchens. That solves the meals catering never covers well — the 6am tea before haldi, the post-vidaai breakfast, the late-night maggi for the cousins who danced through dinner. It also gives your vendor staff somewhere to sleep, which is the accommodation line most wedding budgets forget entirely.
That’s the extent of it. We don’t cook your wedding dinner and we won’t pretend to have an opinion on who should.
Planning a Tricity wedding? If you want the venue-side view — which Mohali and Zirakpur venues have real kitchen infrastructure versus which ones need a full temporary setup — message me. That part I do know, because I’ve watched the trucks arrive.
— Aashish, Amur Stays
