Ours came out to be about $150 a head, including rental fee, cake and parking (included in fee), 4 rounds of appetizers, main course, wine service with dinner, champagne toast, and full open bar. What killed us was the bar tab...
It''s actually a funny story. We had 50 guests. 20 of them do not drink at ALL. So you think 30 guests in 5 hours...how much damage can they do? I told the coordinator gal we would probably have a $2000 bar tab (they charge regular bar prices for drinks). She looked at me like I was crazy and said I would *maybe* do a thousand dollars, but there was no way in hell we would get to $2000, or she would fall over. I told her, I dunno...had she ever seen asians and australians drink? I polled some Aussie friend''s of TGuy asking how many drinks they''d have in an hour. They said 4 drinks per hour. I said that was crazy! In 5 hour that would be 20 drinks!!!
It was a daytime wedding, for god''s sake.
The only stipulation we had on the open bar was NO SHOTS. We didn''t want to get hammered by everyone insisting we do them. If they wanted them, they could pay for them, and we thought it would totally be a deterrent. Not. Not only did people buy shots, they bought tons of them.
In the end, our bar tab (which did not include the wine) came to $1300. HOWEVER, she told us that $600 in SHOTS were purchased by the guests. We felt horrible! We could have certainly paid for $600 in shots in the end. But my father in law said it was the best thing we did, because if people were willing to drink $600 worth of shots if they had to pay for them, can you imagine the damage that could have been done if they were free?
We may be a legend in that venue btw, because it was quite obvious that we could have easily done $2000 in alcohol with only 30 people whooping it up. I''m not sure if I should be embarrassed or not. But at least I was sober!