Downtown Boston Restaurant Weddings for 20K and Less: a How-To Guide
“You double-booked us with an all-day mariachi festival?”
It was not the first time that we had been foiled in our efforts to outsmart the wedding industry. Our first venue, a bed and breakfast, surprised us with a $10,000 surcharge. The second, a historic mansion, burned down. Another venue turned out, upon our visit, to be a totally different location with a similar name.
We found ourselves here out of desire to surround ourselves with loved ones on our wedding day, but without the $50K+ price tag accompanying the average Massachusetts wedding. Matt and I were both transplants to the New England area. Neither of us had any family nearby. We couldn’t imagine asking our family to travel from abroad to a casual park wedding that was vulnerable to rainstorms. It needed to be somewhere easily accessible to out-of-towners – that is, commutable to downtown Boston – and indoors.
As recent graduates, we were highly motivated to pay down our debts and prepare for our future. Financing an elaborate wedding was not part of the picture. We decided that, unless we could do it for $20K or less, we simply couldn’t justify the cost. Many days we wondered whether we should just elope.
Our planning uncovered a bimodal distribution in the (New England) wedding industry. You could find an array of solutions for around 50K, fitting all kinds of personalities and party sizes of 50+, and you could find deluxe microweddings for 10K for 12-20 people, but 50-80 people for 10-20K seemed not to exist anywhere in the region.
Nevertheless, we achieved the seemingly impossible: a 70-person wedding in Back Bay/South End for just over $20K. Finding a niche for our wedding was one of the first major tasks we undertook as a couple. It was so successful that we want to share our logic.
First: Why Restaurants in Cities Make Great Reception Venues Even on a Budget
The cost angle:
At a traditional wedding venue, you aren’t just paying for space, but for rental uniforms, commuting time of caterers, liquor license and bartender which is often a separate service, creating a kitchen that is not already fixed in that location, setup and teardown, etc…
A restaurant’s variables are fixed, unlike a wedding venue. Their employees will show up that night regardless of whether they are serving many small parties or one large one.
There are at least some restaurants for whom the price point of full service for a given night is lower than the cost for setup and teardown of a wedding venue.
To identify a restaurant where a buyout is a win-win at 10-20K, look for independent restaurants (not chains) that may be newer or smaller, but not necessarily.
Win-win restaurants totally exist!!! Including in downtown Boston.
The respect for family angle:
First of all: This entire process is exquisitely personal. We’ve been to and absolutely loved casual park weddings, formal weddings that take place on a Sunday afternoon, farm weddings in remote areas, and more. Here we make a case based on our own personal experience, of wanting to make the travel element as convenient for our guests as possible, and still deliver an experience that felt like a traditional wedding and kept our religious/cultural elements intact, without allowing cost to overburden us.
One major reason why we undertook to have a wedding is that the day is not about being the center of attention. It’s the couple’s first big chance to create a single network of love and support by letting the people close to them become close to each other. Additionally, for some families, enacting a time-honored religious or cultural tradition has great value to many generations.
Unless the couple both have family in the same area, you are going to have to choose to inconvenience one or both of the families, which sets a bad precedent and will have the effect of excluding some people who just can’t swing it.
For at least some guests, being asked to attend a Sunday wedding will mean having to take off work Monday. This magnifies the cost of attendance.
Park/outdoor weddings can be utterly gorgeous, can run the gamut from casual to quite formal, and offer a great way to keep spending in check. However, with 100% of our guest list traveling from other parts of the country as well as abroad, we a) knew that commuting from out of the country to central Boston to some random park without commuter rail service would be an unbelievable burden, and b) we couldn’t chance everyone getting rained on after such a schlep.
We just wanted to give everyone a really nice party, great food and drinks, and a chance to dress up in their best and feel beautiful!
Thus, a party in a city venue emerged as the most convenient option for our guests.
How to achieve an ambience where everyone can get dressed up and avoid a $300/head chicken dinner? Even at some of the nicest restaurants in the city, a main course will run you no more than $50-75. We were able to serve an array of appetizers, a sushi dinner, and dessert, and have an open bar, all for far less than the cost of catering at the other wedding venues we visited.
In future blog posts, we’ll unpack each detail of how we planned our wedding, including:
Saving money on makeup artistry by taking professional makeup lessons and buying high quality products – with the result that I can now recreate the effect whenever I want!
How/where to buy wholesale flowers and bundle them yourself, or: how we lost our living room area to 600 roses
How to make a gorgeous no-sew (or low-sew) wedding veil for $15
Navigating resale pages and Facebook groups
Identifying the right photographer (major shoutout to Elyse Heise who was fabulous)
How to find a wedding outfit for less (and the story of my 100-year-old eBay find that needed no alterations!!)
Identify some venues in the Boston area at multiple price points
Promise you that you will figure it all out and have a wonderful day. And as my aunt, our rabbi and officiant, said – “No matter what happens, you’ll wake up tomorrow and be married.”
With love,
Caroline and Matt
Comments
Post a Comment