My husband and I got married at the Crescent Beach Club at the end of August. Overall, the wedding was beautiful, everyone had a great time and had great things to say about the food and the ambiance. The Crescent Beach club is a beautiful venu...e and Chef Val and her team are clearly an asset to the venue.
But like with any wedding, there were a few snags - pretty much all of them because the Crescent’s events team missed a few beats. Honestly, they seemed to be under staffed to us and I am not convinced that they cared much about our wedding.
- The events manager, has a lot of stuff that other brides and grooms have left behind that she offers future couples to borrow. We had arranged to borrow a sign for the ring bearer and nobody ever gave him the sign. He walked down the aisle empty handed. We had also arranged to borrow the venue’s cornhole, giant Jenga, and tic tac toe for the cocktail hour...those were never set up either...and our younger guests were genuinely disappointed about the beach games. My advice is don’t borrow anything, just bring your own, because they don’t remember to put it out anyway. Only things they remembered that we arranged to borrow were the card box and and some lanterns for the bride and groom table.
- The officiant was not given a microphone and most of the guests were unable to hear the ceremony. Given that the crescent puts on 2 weddings a day, I would expect that they are used to having microphone checks. My officiant communicated that she didn’t think she had a working microphone to the events manager before she went down the aisle, and the event team’s response was “it’s fine, don’t worry about it.” This to us was a giant fail on the Crescent’s part. Is asking for a working microphone for the ceremony too much to ask?
- The crescent has two bridal suites, one downstairs and one upstairs where all of the bridal party’s stuff gets moved when the reception starts so that the next bride can use the downstairs suite. The upstairs suite is basically a closet. And it is locked and the bridal attendant needs to let you in. However, anytime I needed to freshen up or put a gift in there my bridal attendant was nowhere to be found (or serving cake to guests one of the times). Each time was a 20 minute ordeal to find someone to get the key from her to let me in there. It was a pain in the ass. And when I went into the bathroom to see if the bathroom attendant could help me, she wasn’t bothered to stop her cell phone conversation to see if the bride needed anything. My advice to future brides is to arrange to have a solution to this ahead of time - especially if you plan to change dresses.
- The upstairs bathrooms for the wedding are open to the public, so guests of the Crescent’s restaurant, Ocean, have access to them as well. We had put together an amenities basket for the men’s room, the entire contents of the basket had been pilfered by 1pm (reception started at 12:30pm). We suspect by restaurant guests, as men don’t carry purses and it would have been easy to see someone walking out with large objects. The only thing they left was the listerine. Our advice is don’t bother with a men’s room amenities basket.
-Lastly, when we had our final meeting with the events team they made it sound like we would be getting a bunch of leftover food packed up. We had 10 adults no-show, and all we received was a piece of salmon, a braised short rib, and a half eaten piece of chicken. So set the bar low for leftovers.