Valentine Mayhem

Like every other restaurant in the USA, this holiday is one our biggest nights of the year. Baring special events, this IS our biggest grossing night of the year mainly due to customer volume and higher overall ticket prices. After months of slower dinner business, it was quite a shock to serve over 130 people in a single night!

This very busy night was proceeded by our first wedding! We've hosted several wedding receptions in the past year, including my own. And while there may have been people married at the ODB in the past, this was the first wedding WE have hosted. It was a small wedding of about 40 that fit perfectly in our banquet room. I plan to post a full length article at my wedding blog once I receive the pictures from the bride and groom at www.oregonweddings.blogspot.com. Anyway, back to Valentine's Day dinner service . . .

The menu for the night consisted of many of our customer favorites like Prime Rib and Scampi, but also include a few entrees available just for the night like the romantic classics Lobster and Chateaubriand - roasted tenderloin for two. Along with specialty desserts, I always include a few select food and wine pairings. or as I like to call them, "Lover's Pairings." I don't think we sold a single package, but they sure are fun to do.

While we do put on considerably more staff for an event of this magnitude, we still weren't quite prepared for the multiple rushes we experienced that night. For events of this size, we open up seating in the chapel and our banquet room as well as the main dining room. Since a high percentage of reservations are for two, we are able to double our seating capacity with 14 tables placed in those two additional dining areas. Atmosphere varied considerably from dining area to dining area. The upstairs with its larger tables of 3 and 4 had a very boisterous feel to it. The chapel has an intimate feel while the banquet room is always a struggle to change into an intimate atmosphere. While a beautiful dining area for groups, the banquet room is a little too open for smaller tables. Using trellises and partitions, I was able to create private spaces around our smaller tables.

Mayhem didn't quite hit until 7:15 when we filled every table in the house for the second time that night. At this point, we started running out of things. Food, plates, silverware, etc. . . New tables were coming faster than servers could keep up and dinner tickets poured into the kitchen. Unlike your normal dinner hour, these dinner tickets - aside from the sheer number of them - were more complex than normal. On this special night, most of the tables splurged on appetizers and dessert in addition to an entree, salad and beverage service of some kind. It was more of what we call a 'full service' dinner. More thinking and time is required for this kind of service.

Its always disappointing to us when we can't provide 100% excellent service. Unfortunately, sheer numbers prevented 100% excellent service and seriously crunched the kitchen. We have our areas to work on, but we're gearing up for the next big events at the restaurant while learning from our mistakes. All-in-all, a successful night.

UPCOMING EVENTS
Our Blue Plate Special - Dinner and a Show - March 7th and 8th
St. Patrick's Day on March 17th

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.