Meet a Wedding Vendor: Alexandria, GetPlated

Photo by Ashleigh Bing Photography

This week on "Meet a Wedding Vendor," we're talking to Alexandria Hammond of GetPlated Catering.

GetPlated is locally owned by husband and wife team: Keyon & Alexandria Hammond! This duo shares a love for the kitchen and family. Keyon is the leader of the squad, a classically trained chef with an edge that brings bold flavors, refinement, approachability and more than 12 years experience as a platinum country club chef.

Alexandria  brings the  distinct eye for details; from the logistics to the plates for every event. Her keen ear for listening has proven invaluable to bringing our private and corporate clients vision to fruition. Have a crazy idea-she's definitely your girl to chat with!

Together they bring  a well-defined palette, fun culinary attitude and most importantly love to GetPlated.

Let's hear from Alexandria!  

Tell us about GetPlated

GetPlated is a boutique catering company specializing in weddings, corporate and social events. We create food based around your memories, and your moments that reflect the very best of you.

Tell us how you got into this business

I do no come from and food and beverage background, but my husband is a classically trained chef, he went to culinary school. He’s worked in some of the best country clubs and hotels in the country. He had this wild idea to start a catering company – I was not on board, to say the least, so it took a little convincing. Now it’s become a family business, a family affair, we’re all in

What do you love about what you do?

Starting from a little seed and seeing in grow into the final product. We start off with this little idea and then it spawns into a final production. There are all of these pieces that come together, you get to see your final vision come to fruition the day of.

Tell us more about your process when working with couples

We like to know a lot of things about the client – travel, food memories, what’s your favorite restaurant, maybe you got proposed to at a restaurant. Maybe there’s something about different travel or cuisines that you love.

We ask questions that might not be tied to food, so about your travel, what did you do on your travels. Sometimes our clients might not think those questions matter, but it matters to us because we can suggest different vessels for plating depending on a piece of art that you saw in Paris. So, we really like to get the whole picture of what the wedding looks like. We tell our clients that we want their wedding to look like the best version of you. We don’t want guests to show up and think “whose wedding is this?” We want it to look very intentional, very personalized, we want to connect all of those little dots that make a couple unique and special.  

What’s a memorable experience you’ve had in your work?

One of my favorites weddings is an “All Things DC” wedding that we worked on. The couple were transplants, and they got married and Blind Whino which is a definitely iconic DC landmark. They wanted to incorporate all of these things for their guests who were coming from out of town. So, we did half smokes, beer flights, not Ben’s Chili Bowl, which was our take on Ben’s Chili Bowl, we did district classics. Things you think of when you think of this region, so Maryland rockfish, traditional steak with a port cherry jam reduction – that’s one of the entrees that we did. We did an ode to Chinatown, and our Ethiopian roots that are in DC. Bringing all of those flavors to the forefront of what makes DC so special for our client and for their guests who were from out of town.

Do you have any advice for couples during the pandemic?

My advice would be to celebrate the original date that you had to reschedule. Whether that’s still getting married with a small elopement, or maybe it’s a cupcake to say this was a special date for us – it’s still a special date for us. We just want to celebrate for what it is, it’s still a day of life.

Tell us something special about your own wedding

My favorite moment from my own wedding is that we catered our own wedding. There were about 15-20 guests, but we just knew that for us that we wanted our food to look like the things we eat, restaurants that we go to. We had mini fish tacos, oysters, ice cream sundaes, gin and tonic bar. What we tell our couples is what we live by in our own life.

Looking get in touch with Alexandria? You can find her here: 

Instagram: @getplateddc

Website: getplateddc.com