Weddingbee Blog

PBear and I love excuses to eat (and talk about) delicious food. I think that’s pretty obvious by my numerous posts about nothing but food.

Thus, one of the numerous decisions we have to make in the relatively near future is where we want to host our rehearsal dinner. Though it’s not going to be nearly as elaborate (and hopefully not nearly as expensive) as the wedding itself, we would like for it to be relatively nice.

As with many of our big decisions, for our rehearsal dinner, we started our search with a list of criteria.

1. Has to be close to the venue. We’d like to stick to 10 minutes walking distance from the venue. Because we are inside Boston proper, and most of our guests are from out of town, we want to go somewhere that wouldn’t involve driving or public transportation.
2. Can host a semi-private area for 16–25 people. We don’t have our exact rehearsal guest list yet, but hopefully we can keep the list down. We would like a place where we don’t have to worry about bothering other customers and where we can actually hear ourselves.
3. Cheap-ish. We’d like to stay under $50 a person total.
4. Good food.

With that in mind, we created a spreadsheet of all of the restaurants in the vicinity, which had like six or seven different choices. Yeah, we really suck at narrowing this down.

PBear insisted that we had to try out all of the restaurants before we made a decision. Well, you don’t have to ask me twice.

The first place on our list was a seafood place nearby. They were first on our list because they looked like by far one of the cheaper options, and I really liked the idea of having seafood at our rehearsal dinner. Seafood is definitely a big part of Boston food culture, and it would be a waste not to share it with our families.

We tried to stick with items on their private events menu.

First up was their clam chowder, which was delicious. It had a very strong pepper kick, which I definitely appreciated. While having the clam chowder, though, I realized I’m sure half of the people we’re inviting wouldn’t eat it. Oh well, their loss.

I had their crabcakes, while PBear had their gingered sea bass.

I think the gingered sea bass was better than the crabcakes. The rice with the crabcakes wasn’t very flavorful. The gingered sea bass was very flavorful and the vegetables with it were very good. That being said, overall, while they were OK, I think we’ve had better. We were pretty stuffed by this point, but we couldn’t leave without trying one of their desserts. We had their peach cobbler with berry gelato.

I have to say, the cobbler was a huge disappointment. The middle was a giant cake, with the fruit around it. The cake was so thick and not very flavorful. It really didn’t have all of the character that you would usually expect with cobbler.

I think overall we were not that excited by the experience, especially given the price tag. Oh well, one down, five more to try. I think this is my favorite part of planning.

How did everyone pick a rehearsal-dinner place? Was it as elaborate of a decision-making process as ours is turning out to be?