Sunday, January 17, 2010

Rehearsal Dinner: Check!

When it came time to look into rehearsal dinner locations, I had only one spot in mind. There is an amazing Italian restaurant in Newport called Sardella's. It was "our spot", when we lived in Newport. By junior or senior year, we pretty much went on a weekly basis.

It is also the place we went to celebrate our graduation with my family, the place we went for Valentine's day, birthdays, anniversaries, family and friend's visits to Newport, and of course on the night we celebrated our engagement. I was really hoping to have our rehearsal dinner here. The thing is, I didn't want to be pushy or demanding. My future in-laws have been exremely generous throughout the wedding process (and life in general) and haven't made any real requests. Since they have offered to host the rehearsal dinner, I didn't want to tell them where to have it.

When they came to visit for Christmas, we planned a day in Newport, where we could show them the wedding venue, look into rehearsal dinner locations and morning after brunch spots. When it came time to talk about the rehearsal dinner location, FMIL Newport recommended Sardella's. We both obviously loved the idea, but thought they'd want to look into a few more places. We were wrong, actually I was wrong. We had thrown around a few spots, as we are more familair with the area. Luckily Mr. Newport's parents know how much it means to us, and decided to just have it there. We didn't even look anywhere else.

The day after Christmas, we drove to Newport, and took a look at the space. Although we have been there multiple times, we hadn't seen the event rooms. We decided on a small room towards the back of the restaurant. It has a stone wall with inserts to put candles. It's technically outside, but enclosed. I'm already imagining an intimate rehearsal dinner, with our closest friends and family, eating great food, drinking great wine by candlelight at "our spot".
Are you having your rehearsal dinner at a location with some sort of significance to you and your fiance? Was the search for a location easy, or did you need to look around a bit?

4 comments:

Aylee Bits said...

Congratulations on the big check! We were actually thinking of having our rehearsal dinner there as well. But we decided we wanted to do a clambake that we couldn't do for the wedding.

Nicole-Lynn said...

That's wonderful you're able to go where you love! That was very nice of them to let you choose and go with what they know you like. We'll be having our wedding out of the area a 'semi-destination' wedding so we don't have a clue where we'll go yet :)

starfish said...

@ Aylee Bits, I love the idea of a clambake. I've seen so many amazing inspiration boards and it would be so fun too do one in Newport. If we weren't having our wedding in October, that may have been a contender.

Katie said...

The restaurant looks lovely! We are currently trying to figure out the rehearsal dinner issue as well!