| rev:text
| - I attended my cousin's wedding at the Mandarin Golf & Country Club yesterday. These are my thoughts.
First and foremost, the 2 stars comes predominantly from the lack of staff during cocktail hour, and the failure to provide an adequate and comfortable environment during dinner hour.
We arrived at 2pm and were given private use of a sectioned off part of the main dining restaurant for the purposes of the tea ceremony. After which was the actual marriage ceremony. The ceremony was held outdoors. To get to the outdoor ceremony, we all had to descend a flight of stairs. The ceremony felt rushed and the officiant (which I can only assume was provided or at least recommended by the Mandarin) was horrible! There were no readings from the bible, not even a love poem or quote. Just an officiant who made the poor couple repeat their vows in such a robot-like fashion who spoke poor English. The microphone also conched out halfway through the vows, and the bride and groom, instead of speaking sweet nothings about happily ever after were shouting their vows GI Joe style.
After the ceremony, the guests were all paraded into the outdoor tent that held 23 tables. The ridiculous part is that somehow, they thought a space heater (1 at each end of the tent) would keep such a large tent warm. To add insult to injury, the door would fly open throughout the night as the open bar was about a 30 second walk from the bar.
The reception went on for 2.5 hours until the actual dinner, which IMHO was a bit long. It seemed even longer because they had only 2 servers (teenage boys) working and like the ladies that push out in-demand dishes at dim sum, the 2 servers were rushed by the masses. The poor people sitting at the other side saw nary a crudites. Not to mention, the bar wasn't opened during cocktail hour.
The actual banquet was pretty good. Although I thought switching dishes after EVERY course (and when you attend a Chinese wedding, there are about 10 courses) was a bit excessive. The GM, Vincent, socialized more than he did pay attention to what was going on. We had to notify him of the hors d'oeuvres situation, and I thought it was pretty bad that they didn't have sufficient heating inside the tent. We ended up raiding the nearest Costco and buying a dozen more out of our own pockets.
The fried rice and yi-mein part of the dinner was pretty shitty. In fact, it wasn't even real "fried" rice. I thought such a "high-end" place would be able to make at least a tasty fried rice. The food, having traveled from the kitchen to the outside to get to the tent, of course, got cold. So we couldn't even warm up THAT way.
Last but not least, when the wedding cake was disassembled and served at the dessert table with coffee/tea, they had 2 jugs of coffee sitting out, that basically ran out by the time the 10th person got to it.
Perhaps I have high expectations, but I think the things I have written about are quite simple things you'd expect out of a banquet hall. In the end, I think its safe to say I would NOT want to host my wedding at the Mandarin.
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