Well, I got this email on Monday, May 27th (Memorial Day) and it broke my heart:
Not only was I shocked that I didn't get to go have one last Long Island or their amazing ranch, but we no longer have a rehearsal dinner location!
Now, Memorial Day isn't exactly the prime time to be finding a new restaurant/caterer/location. I will say that I let it completely ruin my day off because we spent it trying to figure out what to do when the wedding was only 4 weeks away. More than anything, I was frustrated. They had already made the arrangements to lease the building to this other restaurant, so why couldn't they have given me a call and a little advanced notice?
We still don't really know the details of why they closed so suddenly. The owners are getting older and I could see them wanting to retire, but I always figured that their son and partial owner would eventually take over. There definitely could have been factors outside of the public eye, but it is sad to see it go. On the bright side, the CEO of company Adam works for bought the Hibachi Hut name, recipes and it will be re-opening under new ownership, in a new location, in a few months (but it still doesn't solve our problem...you know, the important things here!).
Starting that Tuesday, we began our search (Part 2) of a rehearsal dinner location. I called a couple of places around town and got some information. Adam's Dad made a phone call for us to a place where he knows the owner and did the same. A lot of places were already booked, they didn't have a separate room for us or they wanted at least $1000 in sales to secure the group reservation. Well, we're not spending $1000 (and by we, I mean Adam's Dad). We finally settled on Rambler's Steakhouse. They have a room off to the side, we can select the menu and there's no reservation or amount that we have to secure to use it.
And so, we're in the process of picking out our menu now. I RE-printed our rehearsal dinner invitations, opened up all the envelopes that were already sealed, stamped and ready to go in the mail with the incorrect information and replaced it with the correct ones. Got the glue and scotch tape out and resealed them (not the prettiest for Perfectionist Lindsy) and sent them off with the right destination this time. I still find it so strange (and lucky) that I had those rehearsal invitations sitting around for about a week and never stuck them in the mailbox. Yay procrastination.
For our rehearsal/dinner invitations, I did some searching on Etsy and found some designs I liked. I let Adam pick and then went to work in PowerPoint, yes PowerPoint again. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, but don't sue me if these were you Etsy invitations that I copied! I downloaded a ton of fonts from www.dafont.com (in order of appearance below): Trajan Pro, Ornaments Labels and Frames, Riot Squad, Castro Script, Gabriola(standard font), and Frosting for Breakfast.
Here they are!
For the wedding party and parents:
For grandparents:
I did same them as image files and then put them into a Word document so that it would print 2 per page. I had to use Adam's computer and it really messed with the image quality when saving as pictures, so watch out for that! I previously had a Mac and it let you control the image quality from the save box, but Windows wasn't as nice (at least the version of PowerPoint that he has wasn't).
We decided not to include aunts/uncles and people that are coming from out of town in the rehearsal dinner. While it would be nice to see them and spend time with them, we really couldn't justify the extra spending because it would add a lot more people. We're already at about 35 people, so that will be plenty!
And rehearse we shall! Thank goodness we didn't have to pay Hibachi Hut a deposit or I would be even more bummed/angry than before. While it's been a huge pain in the ass, it will work out just fine this way, we'll rehearse and it will be spectacular.
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