The aquarium itself is great— a unique and beautiful venue— and the staff are super responsive, organized, and efficient. If I were basing this review just on the aquarium staff then it would be five stars, hands down. Unfortunately, though, th...ey work exclusively with the Patina Group for catering, and this company is a disaster. I’ll spare the internet the full details, but the short of it is this: They deferred our requests to schedule our tasting dinner until four weeks before the wedding (which was in mid October). The day after we finally had it and firmed up our menu, they emailed to let us know us know that they were increasing our contract cost by $10,000, or a full 33% of the original cost. Again, they did this four weeks before our wedding, with no forewarning, in a breezy 3 line email that referred vaguely to “unexpected price increases.” Notably, the increases were mostly associated with labor costs and managerial fee mark-ups, not food costs based in our selections at the dinner. We were blindsided. When we protested, they told us they would “work with us.” This largely consisted of leveraging the fact that we had fewer guests attending than originally estimated and also revising the number of hors d’oeuvres served down to 2/3rds of our guest count— because why should we want there to be enough for everyone? They also told us that we were the only couple to complain about a last-minute price hike in our contract, as if we were in the wrong. (Mind you, when I told people about the increase, the most common response was an astonished, “Is that legal?” )
To make matters worse, the night of our wedding, the service was a mess. They carved the wrong name for me into a decorative watermelon accompanying a flavored water station set out for guests before the ceremony; they repeatedly ignored our requests to open the sides of the reception tent (we wanted to minimize chances of COVID transmission and had discussed this explicitly days before the wedding, and then repeated it day of); they forgot to set aside wedding cake slices for me and my husband, so that we didn’t get any; they neglected to set out our wedding favors until all but the final guests remained, so lots of guests didn’t get them after we spent hours curating and copying a customized playlist onto 130 thumbs drives. The whole thing was disorganized, impersonal, and seemed sort of thrown together. We felt disappointed and taken advantage of, which was a real bummer because we love the aquarium and their staff members were great. If anything, I would just strongly urge the aquarium to consider dropping their exclusive contract with Patina and allow couples to explore other vendors. I’m sure there are lots of great local groups to work with. As it stands, with Patina as the only caterer/ event mgmt group to contract with, I sadly can’t recommend having a wedding at the aquarium.