A Bride Is Defending Her Idea To Serve Chili's Take Out At Her Wedding

When the inevitable task of picking food out comes up for an engaged couple, the prices can get astronomical. It seems like if you tag the word “wedding” onto any sort of product or service, the price immediately jumps up a couple thousand dollars.

Sometimes wedding food costs can get up to $200-$250 per plate. In this economy? No thank you!

One bride had the absolutely brilliant idea to cater in food for her wedding from everyone’s favorite restaurant — Chili’s — and guess what? It was a smashing success.

Madison Mulkey (@brideisapersonality) recently posted a video explaining why she and her husband decided to serve Chili’s at their wedding, and while, sure, the concept may seem a little out there, or even in bad taste, she ended up saving literally thousands of dollars and her guests didn’t suffer one bit.

In total, Mulkey and her husband spent $1,950.04 on the food for 99 guests. In the order, the meal came with chicken tenders, sliders, egg rolls, chips and salsa, etc. They also added five specialty meals for people with dietary restrictions such as intolerance to gluten, dairy and seafood.

“First of all, we loved the price point,” Mulkey said. “It’s insane that we only spent that much for our wedding food.”

The couple had 99 people at their wedding, bringing the cost per person for the food to roughly 20 dollars per person. That is significantly lower than the average cost at weddings right now.

According to The Knot 2022 Real Weddings Study, the average price of food was $75 per person. To put into perspective how much they saved, if she was serving food from a typical caterer or event space, Mulkey would have shelled out $7,425 total.

While the price was definitely right, Mulkey pointed out a couple downsides to ordering catering from a place like Chili’s. First, they had to pick the food up several hours before the event to avoid a $300 delivery fee — and had to find a way to keep it fresh and cold and then to reheat it properly.

Thankfully, Mulkey’s aunt works in the service industry and helped get the process in order, though Mulkey admits the process was still stressful.

If you’re wondering how reheated Chili’s food went over with Mulkey’s wedding guests, she says the guest loved it.

“The food was amazing,” she says in the clip. “Other people said so too ... It was the perfect meal for our wedding.”

The video soon went viral, gaining over nearly 2 million views, with thousands of TikTok users commenting on the out-of-box idea — either praising her food choice or questioning the amount of work it took to make it all worth it.

“I would be so hype to find out the wedding food was chili’s,” one user wrote.

Another said, “My sister got married in March and spent like $10,000 on the food and it suckkkkeddd lmao should’ve gotten chilis.”

Mulkey replied, “Wedding food is so expensive!”

One user joked, “Trusting the algorithm to bring me to the coordinator telling the horror story of the bride who made them reheat $2k worth of Chilis.”

Another user said, “Lmao welcome to the wedding here’s your food, go wait in the microwave line”

“Btw it was all freshly cooked and prepared in the kitchen. We refrigerated it and then cooked it. It was all to code 😂” Mulkey said.

In a follow-up video, Mulkey shared photos of the food after several commenters were curious to how it looked on a plate.

Her husband’s plate was filled to the edges with all kinds of Chili’s goodness like Big Mouth Bites, Chicken Crispers, and chips and salsa. Mulkey, who is gluten and dairy free, had the chicken bacon avocado sandwich.

The video went so viral that the official Chili’s TikTok account reached out to Mulkey — and they’re sending her a wedding gift. Let’s hope it’s more chicken crispers and bottomless chips and salsa!