Plan Garden Room catering stations around flow, not just food.

The Garden Room holds up to 150 guests, and its floor plan is one open room rather than a single fixed dining layout. That matters for catering. At cocktail hour, stations spread food across several points around the room, so guests move in smaller groups and keep circulating instead of standing in one long queue. For a Garden Room wedding, that makes the hour before dinner feel like a party where people are actually mingling, plates in hand. Dinner itself is a buffet, laid out so the line doesn’t cut the room in half.

Our in-house chefs build the menu and the station plan together, because they’re not separate decisions. A carving station needs counter space and a chef standing at it. A raw bar needs ice and refrigeration nearby. A pasta or slider station needs a heat source. The Garden Room’s kitchen access and layout were planned with this in mind, so none of these require rented equipment trucked in for the day. What you’re choosing isn’t just food — it’s where your guests stand, how long they wait, and how the room feels before dinner. That’s the actual planning conversation, and it happens well before the wedding day itself.

Stations aren’t an upgrade you pay extra for line by line. They’re part of how the in-house chefs run cocktail hour within your package, the same way the tiered cake and tasting are already built in. The tradeoff is a planning conversation, not a bigger invoice: you’re deciding where the carving station goes relative to the bar, whether the dessert table sits near the cake or across the room, and how many stations make sense for your guest count. For the full list of what’s in every Garden Room package, see what’s included.

Where a station goes matters more than what’s on it. Put the carving station in the path guests take from the ceremony and the line blocks the doorway. Put the dessert table too far from the cake and guests split their attention across two ends of the room. The Garden Room’s coordinators walk this out with you during planning — where the bar sits, where the DJ sets up, where each station lands relative to guest tables — because all of it affects the same 150-person room. A station plan that works on paper can still create a bottleneck if it ignores where 150 people are already sitting.

Guest count changes the math. A wedding closer to the Garden Room’s 150-guest ceiling needs more stations, spaced further apart, so no single line gets long. A smaller wedding in the same room can run two stations comfortably and skip the rest. This is one of the reasons the venue price for the Garden Room is quoted as a range rather than a flat number — see pricing for how guest count and season affect the total. The station plan itself doesn’t change your invoice mid-planning; it’s built into the same conversation as your headcount and your menu.

None of this replaces a tasting. Every package includes a cake tasting, and the same applies to the stations themselves — you sit down with the chefs, taste what’s proposed, and adjust before it’s locked in. That’s the point of an in-house kitchen instead of an outside caterer working from a generic menu: the people cooking your food are the same people who’ll be standing at the station on the day, and they’ve done it in this exact room before. If you’re still deciding between formats, a planner can walk the room with you and show where past weddings have placed each one.