Wedding Catering in Middle Tennessee

Wedding food has a scheduling problem before it has a taste problem. The ceremony starts twelve minutes late. Photographs take longer than the photographer said they would. Dinner goes out whenever the room is finally full. That is rarely the hour printed on the timeline. A caterer who finished cooking at two o’clock is serving at six, and by then the food has spent four hours in a warming box.

We cook at your venue while your guests are standing there. If dinner slides forty minutes, so do we. Nothing has been sitting.

Three ways a wedding can run

You pick four entrees off our menu and every guest orders whichever one they want. What changes between the three formats is where that happens and how the room moves.

Couples with a tight reception schedule usually take the Loaded Bar, because a line moves faster than individual orders. Couples who want the trailer in the photographs take Loaded Truck. Loaded Stations is the one that feels most like a served dinner while still being cooked in front of the guest.

How long dinner actually takes

Our lines go just as fast as any normal buffet, and the buffet stays open afterward for seconds. When you send an inquiry, we'll give you an estimate of how long it will take to serve your guests. For a wedding that matters more than it sounds, because dinner is the only part of the evening with something immovable on the other side of it. Toasts, the first dance and the band’s start time all sit behind the meal, and a meal that runs long pushes every one of them.

Where that lands in a real running order is set out in the wedding day timeline.

Barns, farms and venues with no kitchen

Most of the good wedding venues around here were built for something else. Barns, working farms, fields with a view, a family property with a long driveway. Almost none of them has a commercial kitchen, and that rules out a surprising number of caterers.

It changes nothing for us. We are self contained: no power hookup, no water hookup, no kitchen access, no prep room. We arrive with everything and leave with everything. The longer version, including the questions a venue coordinator will ask you, is in catering a venue with no kitchen.

What the site does need is short:

• The trailer is 22 feet long and is towed by a full-size Chevy van, so it needs a route in and room to maneuver into the spot.
• Solid ground. A trailer this heavy will sink or get stuck in soft ground, and that matters most after a wet week.
• Nothing else for catering or a one-day festival. We are self contained.
• For festivals of two days or more, a 50-amp RV-style outlet within 50 feet, and access to potable water.

How many guests

We serve up to 400 guests for the Loaded Bar and up to 300 for Loaded Stations. Those are event capacities rather than an hourly throughput, so a 350-guest wedding is one job and not three sittings.

At the other end, small weddings come up constantly and the answer is less obvious than people expect. Whether a twenty-guest event works comes down to where the truck already is that day. It is always worth asking. Both ends of the range are covered in how many guests we can serve.

What you decide, and when

Less than most caterers ask of you, and later.

• At booking: the date, the venue, a rough guest count, and whether you want plates and utensils from us or would rather supply your own.
• about two weeks out: a rough split of how many guests will take potato and how many will take pasta. An estimate is genuinely fine. Nobody has ever got this exactly right and it does not need to be.
• about a week before the event: your four entrees, your final guest count and the serving time.

There is no tasting menu to schedule and no seating chart to hand over, because guests order for themselves on the night.

Guests who eat differently

A potato or a pasta bowl is a base that takes almost anything, so a table of picky eaters, a vegetarian cousin and a nine-year-old all get something they will actually eat without anyone ordering a separate meal for them. There are vegetarian options. There are no vegan ones, and we would rather say so than improvise on the night.

If a guest has a serious allergy, call us rather than putting it in an email. That is a conversation about which dish and which ingredient, and it deserves a real answer.

Whether a food truck suits your wedding

The honest comparison between a truck cooking on site and a caterer bringing food in is set out in food truck or buffet caterer. It covers what genuinely differs: timing, staffing, what happens when your numbers move in the last fortnight, and how the room behaves during the meal.

Where we go

We cater across Middle Tennessee, North Alabama and North Georgia, bounded by Nashville to the north, Huntsville to the west, Dalton, Georgia to the south and Cookeville to the northeast. Travel is folded into the price we quote, so a venue an hour out does not produce a mileage line at the end.

Asking about your date

Send the date, the venue and a rough headcount and we will tell you whether it is free. Saturdays in spring and fall go first, so early is better, though a short lead time is worth a call rather than an assumption.

Call 931-271-7455, email nicholas@itsloaded.com, or send the wedding details and we will come back to you. What a quote includes is on the catering page, the questions couples ask most are on the catering questions page, and every guide we have written is listed under planning guides.