How many guests can Italian Banquet Company cater at a castle wedding?

From intimate weddings of 10 to 25 guests up to full Italian banquets of 200 guests.

The Long Walk to the Table: Cooking a Wedding at Glamis Castle

August 15, 2026

A candlelit dining room dressed for an Italian wedding banquet at a Scottish castle

In short

Italian Banquet Company caters Italian wedding banquets at Glamis Castle, in the Angus countryside outside Forfar, and at other historic castles across Angus, Perthshire, Fife and Aberdeenshire.
We cook on site, in the castle's own kitchen, with a full chef's brigade — not reheated food brought in from a central unit.
The defining problem of castle catering is distance. Great houses were built with the kitchen deliberately far from the dining room, for smoke, noise and fire risk. Fresh pasta has a window of a few minutes. The meal has to be designed around that walk before anyone arrives.
The answer is planning, not speed. We time the route the morning before, stage the courses that cannot wait closest to the room, and cook backwards from the moment a guest picks up a fork.
Capacity: intimate weddings of 10 to 25 through to full banquets of up to 200 guests.

On cooking at Glamis Castle in Angus — and the oldest problem in grand-house catering: the distance between the stove and the people.

Every kitchen has a geography, and in a modern building it is a short one. The pass is a few steps from the dining room. You plate, you turn, the food arrives. The whole design of a restaurant is an argument that hot food should not travel far.

Great houses were not built on that principle. They were built on the opposite one. In a castle, the kitchen was deliberately placed away from where anyone ate — for the smoke, for the noise, for the fire risk, and frankly because nobody who dined in the room upstairs was ever intended to think about the room downstairs. The food came up when it came up, and someone else worried about how.

Which means that when you take a travelling Italian kitchen into a place like Glamis, you inherit a four-hundred-year-old problem. Fresh pasta does not care about heritage. It has a window of a few minutes in which it is exactly right, and after that it is something else. Everything about how you cook a wedding in a castle comes back to that gap between the stove and the table, and how you close it.

Glamis

Glamis sits in the Angus countryside outside Forfar, at the end of a long straight avenue with the Grampians behind it. It is one of those buildings that does not photograph as large as it feels. You come up the drive and the turrets stack up against the sky and the scale only lands properly once you are standing under it.

It has more history attached to it than almost any house in Scotland — a childhood home of the Queen Mother, the birthplace of Princess Margaret, a name Shakespeare borrowed for Macbeth. Couples who marry here know all of that. It is part of why they chose it.

What that means for the food is subtler than it first appears. A venue this grand can carry an enormous amount of formality — but it does not need any help being impressive. The building is doing that work already. What it needs from the food is not more grandeur. It is warmth. Something that stops the room feeling like a museum and starts it feeling like a dinner.

That is a genuinely useful thing to understand before you write a menu for a castle.

The problem of distance

So: the walk.

In a house like this the kitchen you are given is not next door to where the guests are sitting. There are corridors. There are often stairs. There may be doors that need holding, thresholds, a turn you cannot take quickly with a full tray. On the day, that walk is measured in seconds, and those seconds are the difference between a plate arriving as it should and a plate arriving merely acceptable.

The answer is not to rush. Rushing in an old building is how things get dropped and how people get hurt. The answer is to design the meal around the walk before anybody arrives.

That starts with walking it yourself, empty-handed, the day before if you can and first thing in the morning if you cannot. You time it. You find where the tray sticks. You work out how many people you need standing along that route so that no single person is carrying anything for longer than they should be. You decide which courses can hold and which cannot, and you build the menu so that the ones that cannot are the ones you have staged closest.

Then you cook backwards from the table. Not from the stove — from the moment somebody picks up a fork.

Why pasta is the hard part

Almost everything else on an Italian menu is forgiving. Antipasti are served at room temperature by design, which is why they are perfect for a reception in a castle courtyard. A slow-braised secondo will sit and be better for sitting. Dessert has no urgency in it at all.

Pasta is the exception, and it is the course we are least willing to compromise on. You can read more about how and why we roll our pasta by hand on site, on the day.

Fresh pasta made that morning — rolled out, filled, shaped by hand on a table in whatever room they have given us — has a very short moment of being right. It goes into the water for a minute or two. It comes out. From that point the clock is unforgiving, and no amount of good intention brings it back.

So the pasta course dictates the choreography of the entire evening. Where the pans go. How many hands are on the pass. Who is standing where in the corridor. What time the speeches have to finish, which is a conversation worth having early and politely with whoever is running the day.

Get the pasta right in a castle and everything else follows. Get it wrong and it does not matter how beautiful the room is.

Cooking for Angus

Glamis sits in a part of Scotland we know well. Angus is soft-fruit country, farm country, with the coast at Arbroath a short run east and some of the best produce in Britain grown within half an hour of the castle gates. We cook up and down this county — country houses, private estates, family homes — including a week-long residency at Kinblethmont House near Arbroath — and there is a real pleasure in cooking Italian food from Scottish ground that is genuinely this good.

That is not a marketing line. Italian cooking is regional cooking. It is built on the idea that you use what is near you and you do not gild it. Applied honestly in Angus, that means Scottish produce cooked with Italian technique, which is a far more interesting proposition than either flying everything in or pretending you are in Emilia-Romagna.

The room at the end of it

There is a moment at a castle wedding that never quite loses its effect on me. The guests have come through from the reception. The room is candlelit. The building has stopped being a monument and become, for a few hours, somebody's dining room — a very large one, with a very long history, but a dining room.

And then the food starts arriving, hot, at the right moment, having come further than anyone at the table will ever realise.

Nobody notices the walk. That is the entire point. All the planning, all the timing, all the standing in corridors the morning before — the whole job is to make sure that no guest ever has a single thought about how their plate got there.

They should only be thinking about what is on it.

Frequently asked questions

Does Italian Banquet Company cater weddings at Glamis Castle?
Yes. Italian Banquet Company caters Italian wedding banquets at Glamis Castle in Angus, cooking on site with a full chef's brigade in the castle's own kitchen.

Why does a castle wedding need a caterer who cooks on site?
Because the alternative is food that travelled. Great houses place the kitchen far from the dining room, so the meal has to be timed around that distance. Cooking on site is the only way to serve courses that cannot wait — fresh pasta above all — at the moment they are right.

How do you time a multi-course meal in a castle?
By walking the route from kitchen to dining room before the day and timing it, staging the courses that cannot hold closest to the room, putting enough hands along the route that nobody carries anything too long, and cooking backwards from the moment a guest picks up a fork rather than forwards from the stove.

How many guests can you cater at a castle wedding?
From intimate weddings of 10 to 25 guests up to full banquets of 200.

Which other Angus and Perthshire venues do you cater at?
Kinblethmont House near Arbroath, Drumkilbo House near Meigle, Alexander House in Perthshire, and country houses, private estates and family homes across Angus, Perthshire, Fife and Aberdeenshire.

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