We used UW-Parksides University Ballroom for our wedding reception. The Ballroom and campus are beautiful! BUT if I could go back and redo it, I would not have had the reception there again. When we originally booked the Ballroom, Parkside was ...using Sodexo as their caterer. We met with the Catering Director, John Sill from Sodexo and chose our menu and discussed many of the details that we wanted to make our day special. We were assured that none of our requests would be an issue. A few weeks before the wedding we were notified by email that the catering company had changed to Aviands and that the Catering Director was changing too. Luckily they were able to make similar dishes to the ones we chose with the original caterer but I felt that a lot of the "promises" originally made to us went out the door when Sodexo did.
For example, I wanted a decorative light curtain behind the head table. This is also where the projector screen is for slideshows. We were told it wouldn't be an issue to have both. The day of setting up, after we spent tons of time making the light curtain and slideshow, the building manager said no way, it's one or the other. We also talked about taking pictures on campus and were told that we'd have free range to all areas and that if there was a specific room we wanted to get in to that the building manager would have keys to let us in. It was pouring rain and about 100 degrees outside so we didn't get to take many outdoor photos. We wanted to take photos in the library but wasted a lot of our photo time waiting outside of the library to be let in by the building manager only to be told that we weren't allowed in there. Dinner service was incredibly slow. I understand that we were one of the first weddings with the new catering staff but the head table had been served and finished eating and it was still another 45 minutes before some of our guests even got their food. Finally, like I mentioned before, it was probably the hottest, rainiest day of the year. It was sooo warm in the Ballroom. I kept asking the staff if they could turn down the temperature. They never mentioned anything to me about the air being broken but I was later told by one of our guests that also asked if the temperature could be turned down that the storms earlier in the day had caused the power to go out and that they needed an HVAC technician to come and turn the air back on. They said since it was the weekend that they couldn't get anyone in there. REALLY?! You have a wedding reception with 300 people in the room, paying thousands of dollars on the hottest day of the year and you won't bring someone in to fix the air conditioning? Everyone is really sweaty with their hair matted to their faces in our reception photos. Some guests even left early due to the heat and a good majority of our guests that did stay spent the rest of the evening in the hallway where it was cool.
Overall, it was an amazing day regardless. Short of the heat and serving time our guests are still talking about what a great time they had. I'm sure there were more hiccups because we were one of the first weddings with this new caterer - hopefully they've worked through some of that stuff.