Food Station Suggestions

Food stations are a fun way to get your guests to mingle. Generally food stations offer a single type of food like seafood or a particular cultural theme like Asian. Choose several to give your guests a variety of tastes and perhaps the chance to try something new!

Fire and Ice Seafood

Iced shrimp with cocktail sauce
Iced Chesapeake oysters and little neck clams
Steamed mussels with lemon grass, coconut milk & chilies
Sautéed garlic shrimp tossed with angel hair pasta
Pan-seared cocktail crab cakes with jalapeno with crushed corn and thyme cream

Asian Noodle Bar

A selection of three hot noodles served from woks in brightly colored Chinese take-out cartons with chopsticks
Teriyaki beef noodles with scallions
Thai chicken satay noodles with peanuts and coriander
Chinese vegetable noodles with eggplant, pepper and onion

Yo! Philadelphia

Miniature Philadelphia cheesesteaks with sautéed onions, mustard and ketchup
Miniature Italian hoagies
Pepperoni calzone
Caesar salad with creamy parmesan dressing
Soft pretzels with yellow mustard

Our Food

Entertaining Tip

BY STEVE POSES

A Vocabulary of Taste

The richer your vocabulary of flavors, the richer your ability to taste ingredients. The physiology of taste gives us the five basic flavors: sweet, sour, salty, hot, spicy. But associative words enable us to understand taste through other vocabularies. There’s the music of taste: bass and treble notes, staccato, quick, slow, lazy. Colors: pastels and primaries, especially red and green. Garden: fruity, earthy, herbaceous, grassy. Shape: big, high, low, sharp, smooth, mellow. Texture: crisp, soft, creamy, voluptuous. Art history: classic, rococo, baroque, impressionistic, postmodern, deconstructivist. Personality: intense, relaxed, casual, accommodating, confrontational, aggressive. You can also think about food in dimensions along a set of taste descriptions. No fragrance to fragrant. Sweet to dry. Soft acid to puckering. Quiet, unassuming presence to explosive or full presence. Straightforward to complex flavor. Delicate to dank flavor. Brief aftertaste to pervasive, lingering flavor.