Building a Menu That Tells a Story

Food at a wedding is not just sustenance. It is hospitality in its oldest, most elemental form — an act of care extended outward to the people you love most. We wanted our menu to feel like a portrait of us, not a generic catering package ticked off from a spreadsheet.

Starting With Memories

We sat down one Sunday afternoon with a notebook and wrote down every meal we could remember that meant something. The pasta in a tiny restaurant in Florence on our first trip together. The bouillabaisse in Marseille during a rainy long weekend. The tarte tatin my grandmother makes every Christmas that I have been trying to recreate for fifteen years. James's mother's shortbread. The oysters from the market in Bordeaux. The crêpes from the stand on the corner near our apartment.

Feed people the things that made you who you are. A wedding menu is a form of autobiography.

Working With Chef Dupont

Our chef, Laurent Dupont, has been cooking at Miramare for eight years. When we brought him our list of memory-meals, he did not look at us strangely. He read through them slowly, asked a few questions about textures and intensities, and then spent three weeks building a menu around our stories. The result is something that is unmistakably French in technique but personal in its references — a dish that tastes like Florence, a dessert that tastes like Sunday morning at my grandmother's house.