We had our Wedding at Memorytown. We arrived on that day to the "green house" which is what we were given as a ready room for our wedding party plus where we stayed that night after our wedding. To say it needed to be cleaned is an understatement in our opinion. The window sills were full of webs and dead insects and the bedding, which we didn't know about until we went to bed that night, smelled of mildew .
Our ceremony was in the smaller barn due to a possibility of rain. Although it was beautiful, it was so hot many guests had to stand outside. We were told there were fans they could put in the doorways it was never done and in our opinion, had that not been overlooked, it would not have been so unbearable.
After the ceremony, our guests walked to the wine cellar for our cocktail hour and were told that they couldn't go in because WE didn't want them in early so our guest had to wait outside in the excessive heat. This is something that we NEVER said and can't begin to understand why they would be told that. In our opinion, they were completely understaffed for the 152 guests we had there and half our guests had to seek out the servers to get the hors d'oeuvres because one entire side of the room was not being attended to. We were also told to come up with a signature drink so they could make batches ahead of time and have servers passing them out to alleviate the wait time at the bar but that never happened either. Our guest didn't even know we had a signature drink.
Once we were announced at the reception, we had our dance and toast. Unfortunately, our toast was with water because our champagne glasses where never filled prior to our arrival. After our toast, an employee proceeded to bring over the champagne and attempted to fill the glasses. We felt this was unacceptable.
After approximately 45 minutes or so of our reception, the air conditioning system stopped working. There were no fans brought in and it was over 90 degrees outside and hotter in there. In our opinion, when a business has functions as such, a back up plan should be in place. It took nearly 2 hours, of a 4 hour reception, to finally get a repair man there to fix the system.
We chose to have a buffet for dinner and beef brisket was one of the items we chose. We were informed by several employees that there wasn't enough brisket in house, so they ran out the night before and bought London broil and decided to smoke and rub that to pass it off as brisket without our knowledge and that it would be completely acceptable if at least the wedding party received the brisket they had. In our opinion, this was completely unacceptable. We can't begin to understand why if someone went to get the London broil, why they didn't get the brisket that we ordered instead. We feel this was completely deceitful.
The fiasco didn't end there. The last 2 to 3 tables had to wait 20-30 additional minutes to eat because they ran out of food on the buffet and had to wait for it to be made because they didn't make enough ahead of time. We paid additional money because it was a buffet and we wanted additional food so if our guests wanted more they could have it and to have them run out before everyone was served was unacceptable.
In our opinion, the entire day's events were mismanaged from the start. We did reach out to management to discuss our dissatisfaction to no avail. After a brief conversation, we were told that they would call us back within 20 minutes. After nearly 5-6 hours and no call back, we sent a text message stating the above and did indeed ask for a partial refund of money and were told that they couldn't meet our demand. It certainly wasn't a demand but something we felt deserving of with all that transpired.
A Wedding is a special day and one you can NEVER get back and although we made the most of the situation and hope that this will help to serve others who may have thought of using this venue for their special day. read more