The Italian Banquet Company caters weddings on the Isle of Skye and throughout the Scottish Highlands — the most dramatic and most remote settings a couple can choose. These are the weddings where the location is half the vow: a clifftop, a glen, a house at the end of a long single-track road with nothing beyond it but mountains and weather. They take more planning than a wedding round the corner from a city. They are also, very often, the most beautiful work we do.
The Romance of Remote
There's a reason couples travel to Skye and the far Highlands to marry. Few places on earth concentrate so much beauty — the light, the sea, the mountains turning colour through the evening. A wedding here doesn't need much decoration, because the setting does all of it. What it needs is for everything else to live up to the view, and the food most of all. There's nowhere to hide a mediocre dinner when it's being eaten in front of the Cuillin.
Logistics, Turned Into Romance
The thing nobody tells you about a remote wedding is how much quiet logistics sits underneath the romance. The nearest shop is far. The kitchen is borrowed, if there's a proper one at all. Everything that's needed has to be thought of in advance, because you can't nip out for what you forgot. This is exactly the kind of challenge a travelling brigade is built around. We plan the menu to the place, source the best of the local Highland and island larder, bring what the remoteness demands, and cook the whole thing on site — hand-made pasta and all — as though the kitchen at the end of the track were our own. The couple sees only the romance. We take care of the rest.
An Island Larder Worth Travelling For
Skye and the west coast give a cook some of the best ingredients in Britain — langoustine and shellfish from cold clean water, lamb off the hills, whatever the day and the season offer. Cooking with Italian technique and an island larder, in a setting like that, is close to the whole reason we do this work. The food gets to be of the place in the most literal way, served within sight of where it came from.
A wedding on Skye or deep in the Highlands asks more of a kitchen, and gives more back. The further we travel, the more the meal becomes part of the memory of the place — which, on a day like that, is exactly what it should be.
Giuseppe Manzoli is the founder and head chef of The Italian Banquet Company, cooking weddings and celebrations on the Isle of Skye and across the Scottish Highlands — a full chef's brigade that comes to you and cooks on site.