ARTISANworks

Cocktail hour at our wedding was a fiasco!

After a year of planning our dream wedding at ARTISANworks, we were surprised and heartbroken at how badly our plans were executed on the day of the wedding. Long story short, the hour between the ceremony and reception was a complete disaster! My husband and I, along with 20 family members and our photographer, were LOCKED OUT of the second building where we were supposed to take family photos. We had paid an extra 500 for ARTISANworks' event coordinator to make sure the wedding day went smoothly. As we all stood outside, sweating in the hot summer sun, the event coordinator was not responding to my urgent phone calls or text messages. Even after our photographer ran back to the main building to tell her we were locked out, she did not respond in a timely manner. When our elderly relatives started wincing in pain from standing so long, we had to abandon our plans and move back to the main building, where we hurriedly took family photos. As a result of this 30-minute delay, my husband and I MISSED OUR ENTIRE COCKTAIL HOUR! And to make matters worse, when we finally arrived at the reception, we were horrified to discover that the bartender from Madeline's Catering had switched our open bar to a cash bar, and several of our guests were charged money for their drinks before the event coordinator told her it was supposed to be an open bar all night long. We later discovered that a number of our guests never even went to the bar during the cocktail hour because the rumor had spread that it was a cash bar! Furthermore, there was supposed to be a second person behind the bar to pour drinks during the busy cocktail hour, and that did not happen; according to our guests, the bartender was the only person pouring drinks, and sometimes she wasn't even at the bar. We had expressed reservations about using Madeline's Catering for an elegant, upscale event, but ARTISANworks requires you to hire Madeline's and will not allow outside caterers. Our overpriced filet mignon was served with the wrong topping, but otherwise the food was good. However, we did not fully enjoy our honeymoon because we were so mortified that our guests ever thought we expected them to open their wallets at our wedding! (We did get Madeline's to refund their money.) We were also very disappointed that the event coordinator never reached out to us to apologize for any of this until I finally emailed her 12 days after the wedding. A word of advice to anyone thinking of having an event at ARTISANworks: (1) if you hire their in-house event coordinator, make sure to have a communication plan that requires her to respond to your calls or texts if something is going terribly wrong, and (2) insist on speaking with the staff who will be working the event to review the details of the catering contract; do not rely on Madeline to do that, as we found her to not be a good communicator over the course of a year of planning, and she did not put in the necessary time to supervise new staff. Finally, we both love ARTISANworks very much, and we hope that our wedding fiasco was a learning experience so that they and Madeline's Catering will do better in the future.