New Focus

This past summer, we had the opportunity to host a large wedding reception here at the restaurant. Prior to this, our tendency was to catered larger events at other’s venues rather than our own. I posted an article about this wedding at my wedding blog - www.oregonweddings.blogspot.com and both the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom were kind enough to comment about their experience with us. Check it out! Through the experience of hosting this wedding compared to the other events that we catered last year, we discovered our niche! We have a beautiful venue. Why not use it? Here is our new tag for events:

Our Daily Bread Restaurant specializes in hosting private parties here in our beautiful restaurant facility. We have multiple rooms and lovely outdoor accommodations that can be utilized for groups of 15 to 200!

Hosting your event in a restaurant has numerous economic benefits (see my wedding blog) allowing you to save on equipment rentals and site fees! In general, the cost for holding your wedding reception at the ODB is simply that of food and beverage. This is quite the cost saver when you consider most couples have to pay out for a ceremony site and a reception site as well as the rentals and catering cost.

Already in 2009, I have booked three weddings. All three will be having both their wedding reception and ceremony at the ODB. One is, in fact, on Valentine's Day afternoon. Quite the romantic occasion I must say. Two of these three weddings are 30 people or less, meaning they don't need to utilize the whole restaurant facility and will instead use the private banquet room. We can continue the business of breakfast, lunch and dinner as usual. Larger wedding parties that need seating for more than fifty, would choose to use either the upper dinning room alone or the whole restaurant facility. Most weddings want space for a dance floor which eats up a lot of floor space. In that case, even a fifty person wedding may need more space than just the upper dining room provides. For large weddings, we would shut the restaurant down for regular business.

FOOD AND BEVERAGE MINIMUM
Rather than a rental or site fee, I have a FOOD AND BEVERAGE MINIMUM. Meaning, if the combined cost of food and beverage meets the 'minimum' for the day and time requested, then there is no additional cost to use the restaurant or its banquet space.

The minimum for a larger wedding differs from that of smaller weddings. It really depends on the time frame the wedding occupies - weekend vs. Sunday, afternoon vs. evening. The biggest factor in setting the minimum is whether it overlaps more than one meal time and how profitable those meal times are normally. A wedding that prevents us from serving both lunch and dinner on a Friday or Saturday would have a higher minimum than any other day and time.