All About Flavor

Creating a delicious wedding day menu thanks to our caterer AC Events!

Ivy and I LOVE to eat. We’re always on the search for (and stuffing our faces with) really really tasty food.

I’m someone who snacks all the time, and though I try my hardest to conform to three square meals a day, I am driven by flavor-packed bites. Ivy is one of the better cooks I know and while she’s a sucker for a sit-down dinner of steak frites, she shares that passion for absolutely delicious food. Cleary, it’s a match made in heaven!

When dreaming about our wedding day, we knew we wanted to serve good food – bites of sweet, savory, spicy, & absolutely yummy flavors. But even more than that, we wanted our August wedding weekend to tell a story of summer, the foods we dream of when we think of this hot, yet incredible growing season. Plus, we wanted people to just have a good time eating!

Here’s the plan: Our weekend starts with a rehearsal brunch at Vin Rouge – a French bistro on 9th Street packed with charm while serving up some of the best French cuisine around. That evening, we’ll welcome our guests with some beer cheers (and maybe a pizza pie) at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. For our wedding day dessert, we knew it had to be donuts from Duck Donuts and a cake from our bff and baking extraordinaire @snackg1rl (more on the sweet treats coming soon)! And most importantly … drum roll please … our wedding caterer, AC Events!

It only took one look at the AC Events menu to know we had struck gold for our wedding. I mean, of course James Beard Award Winning Chef Ashley Christensen could create a cohesive menu to tell the story of our childhood summers through taste! Truly, it was one of the easiest decisions we made throughout our entire wedding planning process. (Scroll to see our menu!)

Our Summer Stories

Summer to me means tomatoes – my favorite food. North Carolina summers as a kid meant spending time in my grandparents’ gardens – plucking tomatoes from the vine, apples from the tree, snapping green beans, & listing to corn-starched okra pop in the oil fryer. Lunches of white bread, Duke’s mayo, and thick tomato slices. Or pimento cheese with potato chip – courtesy of my mom. I wanted to bring this part of me and my taste buds to the menu.

For Ivy, her summers meant a month in Maine, riding bikes to jump in chilly ocean waters and after, enjoying a half and half tea (what us Southerners would call an Arnold Palmer). It meant full-fledged family dinners at the lobster shack and slurping fresh oysters with friends by the water. If she was telling you about this, she would never forget to mention road trips to Nebraska in her dad’s ‘63 Land Rover – trips which produced some of the best childhood pictures of Ivy, that’s for sure.

Like all of our wedding – we wanted to share the story of us in ways beyond words. I think the menu below nails it!

Our Summer Wedding Menu

Pre-Ceremony Passed Bites

Crushed avocado with lemon oil on sliced cucumber
Classic deviled eggs
Chilled tomato gazpacho shots with micro basil

Post-Ceremony Passed Bites

Little Caesars - parmesan crackers with white anchovy-champagne vinaigrette, shredded romaine, and parmesan
Blackened Carolina shrimp with saffron aioli
Macaroni au gratin frittatine with roasted tomato relish
Prosciutto with truffle honey
Mini tomato pies with basil and horseradish

Post-Ceremony Passed Sliders

Lil' lobster rolls - Maine lobster salad with brown butter mayo and chives
Braised short rib sliders with horseradish crema
Field pea hummus with pita chips

Post-Ceremony Displayed Platters

Oyster Boat Display: house made mignonette, roasted tomato cocktail sauce, lemon, fried saltines
Vegetable crudité with avocado green goddess dressing
Charcuterie selections next to Poole's pimento cheese with accoutrement (pickles, mustard, crostini, etc.)

Coffee Station