My History with Weddings

Somewhere around wedding number 1,500, I stopped counting.

That's not a humblebrag, that's just arithmetic. Most hotels I worked at did 15 to 20 weddings a year. By the time I left the Biltmore, I was personally doing 100 to 120. For almost nine years. Do the math over a 45-year career and you land somewhere north of fifteen hundred couples, all of whom were certain that theirs was the first wedding anyone had ever attempted.

How It Started

I always had the social market, which means I always had weddings — but the Embassy Suites is where it really took hold. Those properties have those big atriums full of foliage and plants, and ceremony spots that photograph beautifully. Very pretty. Very conducive. Brides walked in and made a noise.

But the big, fancy, genuinely unhinged-money weddings didn't arrive until the Biltmore. By then I'd been doing weddings for twenty years. I'd worked with every culture, every configuration, every family structure known to Los Angeles County. So when they handed me those ballrooms, I was ready.

Also, I was about to see some things.

Some Things I Saw

The 650-guest wedding. Everyone lusts after the Crystal Ballroom — max capacity 450. But the Biltmore Bowl, less glamorous but enormous, holds 650. LA has a large Orthodox kosher community and a large Persian and Middle Eastern community, and their weddings run 500, 600 people easily. I maxed that room out. Six hundred and fifty guests. I knew where every one of them was sitting.

The Platinum Weddings weddings. I coordinated two weddings that ended up on the show Platinum Weddings, which had a minimum spend requirement of a quarter million dollars just to qualify. Both of mine came closer to half a million.

One was for a political figure. One was for a very old-money Italian family.

The car. The senator — because of course it was a senator — decided that the appropriate wedding gift for his bride was a Ford Explorer, delivered to the valet area the night of the rehearsal dinner.

I want to note two things here. One, a Ford Explorer is a wonderfully practical vehicle. Two, “we're parking a surprise SUV in the valet during rehearsal” is not a sentence covered in any catering training manual, and yet.

The carpet. Not a Platinum wedding, just an ordinary act of madness. One couple took all four ballrooms: ceremony in the Emerald, cocktail hour in the Gold, reception across the Tiffany and the Crystal. Then — because their theme was white and crystal, and the existing carpet was insufficiently white and crystal — they paid to have every one of those ballrooms re-carpeted in white. Installed before. Removed the day after.

Somewhere between $25,000 and $50,000. For flooring. That existed for approximately eighteen hours.

I have thought about that carpet more than I've thought about some relatives.

The Math of a $125,000 Wedding

At the Biltmore, the average wedding I booked ran about $125,000. People hear that and assume there's some magic to it. There isn't. It's division.

For years I'd booked $15,000 weddings at that hotel without blinking. Then the industry started implementing food and beverage minimums, and because our weddings had been doing so well, we set ours high. Suddenly you could not book the Biltmore for under $40,000 plus tax and service charge.

Now: the average wedding isn't 450 guests. It's about 200. At 450 guests, $100 a head clears a big minimum without anyone breaking a sweat. At 200 guests, you need to be around $225 per person — and you do not get there on dinner and a hosted bar.

So you get there another way. You expand the cocktail hour. You add late-night snacks. A specialty cart. An espresso bar. The minimum doesn't change; the experience does.

That's not upselling. That's telling someone who has to spend the money anyway that they may as well enjoy it.

The Cookies and Milk

My favorite example, ever.

A couple needed to reach their minimum and had nothing obvious to add. But somewhere in conversation, they mentioned that milk — actual milk — had been a whole thing in their dating history.

So at the end of the night, as guests were leaving, we sent out trays of fresh hot chocolate chip cookies with ice-cold little pitchers of milk.

Cost money. Hit the minimum. And they cried.

You cannot get that off a banquet menu. You get it because you asked a question and then — and this is the part most people skip — you listened to the answer.

The Actual Secret, Which Is Boring

People go into sales and get taught to dump. Features, benefits, pricing, dump dump dump. Here is everything we offer, please sign.

I do the opposite. I hold back. I'm clear about what minimums have to be met, and then I shut up and find out what would make them genuinely happy to spend it. Some couples care about food. Some care about the band. Some care about a grandmother's recipe. Everyone wants to wow their guests, but nobody wants to wow them the same way.

The other half of it is flexibility. Hotels have rules, set menus, set pricing, and a little book of What We Offer. Inexperienced catering managers will not quote one syllable outside that book. They say “I'm sorry, we don't do that.”

I say “we can absolutely make that happen, let me talk to my chef and find out what it costs.” Sometimes it's a Filipino family wanting a whole roasted pig displayed at cocktail hour — expensive, spectacular, and it goes straight toward the minimum. Sometimes it's a taco bar and chicken wings at midnight, because everyone's been drinking and that is simply correct.

Most catering managers won't go against the grain to make that happen. I've had 45 years of receipts, so for the last twenty of them, I've been allowed to.

And The Patience

The unglamorous truth: a huge amount of this job is patience with people who are not at their best.

Clients are demanding. Clients can be deeply annoying. It's my job to listen to nonsense. It's my job to sit calmly while a family bickers about the seating chart in front of me. It's my job to not take a single second of it personally, because a wedding is one of the biggest days of someone's life and people get emotional about it in ways they'd be embarrassed by later.

I was not always good at this. Ten years in, I had clients who could make me leave the room.

But somewhere along the way I figured out that patience with annoying people is not a personality trait — it's a skill, and it's most of the job. These are quinceañeras and sweet sixteens and 25th anniversaries and weddings people have been saving for their entire lives. They don't want a vendor. They want someone who acts like they care whether it goes well.

I did care. Fifteen hundred times.

Although I maintain, to this day, that the carpet was insane.