Aracely Cafe was the first and only wedding venue we looked at. It’s a hidden gem, tucked away on Treasure Island. Right away, we fell in love with the place and its story.

Aracely was the perfect backdrop for our wedding. We had a lovely outdoor ceremony in the garden patio, cocktail hour in the beautiful cafe, and a romantic reception under the tented courtyard with string lights. It was special to be able to take sunset photos at the Treasure Island marina just a few minutes away, with a breathtaking view of the San Francisco skyline. We also love the story of Aracely—it was previously an elementary school that was transformed into the most charming cafe and event space. It symbolizes new life, just as our love story does.

It was a dream to have a one-stop shop for our wedding. Aracely is a restaurant, and they served a delicious dinner for our guests. The place already has amazing decor—draping, plants, floral walls, wood accents—so you don’t need to add much yourself. Aracely also did all our linens and florals, and provided lanterns and candles for an extra touch.

Linda is a true visionary and was a joy to work with. She’s an expert event planner and designer, and she helped us every step of the way. She has such an amazing eye, which is evident when you see the venue, and her consultation on everything from decorations to programming was priceless.

We loved our wedding at Aracely, and the best part is that we can always go back for a nice dinner to celebrate our wedding anniversary!

We looked around at a bunch of different venues for a couple months, but it was difficult to find a place we loved for our guest count of 200. When we found Aracely, we knew almost immediately that this was it—beautiful sunlit garden area, cute cafe space, and just a dream of a courtyard with flowing white curtains topped off with string-lit skylight dome. We loved that they were able to do the food, drinks, furnishings, and reception set-up, and coordination internally, which helped us out so much and saved us from too much planning craziness.
Linda and her team are super professional, knowledgeable, and have a keen eye for design, and Tina, our day-of-coordinator, was extremely kind, patient, flexible, and just wonderful to work with. Even with the typical wedding day chaos, the Aracely team somehow rolled with the punches and made everything work out really well :)
The kitchen staff and menu selection are ON POINT. All of our guests loved the dishes, appetizers, and drinks, as did we!
Located in an old elementary school on treasure island, Aracely takes an old structure and turns it into something beautiful.
Thank you Aracely for the kindness, the deliciousness, and the loveliness you gave to our special day!

Aracely Cafe is an absolutely stunning venue. The layout is perfect for any wedding and they have a great back up plan if it were to rain. The transition from the ceremony to the cocktail hour and finally to our reception was perfect. They also catered our food which was DELICIOUS. Our guests could not stop raving about how amazing the venue and kept asking us how we found the place.

There were a couple of hiccups though. The wedding coordinator was not as responsive as we'd like on some things. I felt like the coordinator was so busy managing the facilities that it was potentially difficult for her to be 100% catered to our needs.

Additionally, on the wedding day, the coordinator brought a different couple on a tour to see the venue. That is absolutely unprofessional and I was a little shocked that happened. Luckily it was quick, but the coordinator should be focused on our day and not having strangers see what our wedding looked like...

Other than that, great venue and great price.

There wasn't much information about this place as a wedding venue when we were looking, so hopefully this offers some insight. Overall, I would recommend this venue only if you're on a budget as there are many reasonable catering and bar options, and they do a wonderful job with flowers for a great price. Also, we enjoyed working with Lety as our day of coordinator. However, many things went wrong during the wedding and the time leading up to it. Also, be aware there is no skyline view from the venue and actually lots of construction all around.

The biggest issue we had was that there wasn't enough food for our guests. Many people had to share a piece of salmon while others didn't get any at all. To make matters worse, Linda claimed that there were additional guests beyond our original count and wanted to charge us MORE MONEY after the wedding. In reality, some people could not make it and there were less guests than we anticipated. Also, we were mysteriously charged $1000 for exceeding our bar tab towards the end of the night, when many guests had already left. We ended up paying the bar tab even though it was logically and mathematically unlikely, and although Linda kept fighting us about the extra guests, she eventually let it go.

The other negatives were more minor and we could have been happy with the venue if not for the disingenuous business practices after our wedding. For example, we worked with Linda to plan our wedding and she is probably very busy, but it took her a week to respond to our emails. It was frustrating because we could not move forward with planning. Also, we thought the food tasting should be included in the price, but we had to pay for it. We could overlook that, but on the day of the tasting Linda called to say there had been a mix up in the kitchen and we would have to reschedule. My fiance and I had both taken time off work to get to Treasure Island early for this, so it was upsetting. This made us worry about the day of the wedding, and it seems as if our fears came true. We can't believe that as a restaurant, this venue could not handle something as basic as the food.

My husband and I had our wedding reception here and although the food is good and the servers are nice, the management team and professionalism is terrible. I scheduled an appointment to meet with Linda and I let her know that I was coming from Marysville which is 2 1/2 hours away, she sent a message the night before to confirm, which I did. The next day my sister and I drove all the way there, and waited 30 minutes and she never showed up. The staff apologized and said she had an emergency, so we decided to keep the venue, but that was a mistake. Linda doesn’t seem to have time to read or respond to emails which was another issue, I ended having to forward her emails that I sent days before because she’d say she didn’t get them. My husband and I set up a date for our tasting ($65 per person) and asked if she was able to go over a few things once we got there and she agreed, but when we arrived she didn’t come out to greet us and we didn’t end up seeing her until after the tasting. When I asked questions Linda was very short with me and rude. At this point it was too late to change venues so we brushed it off. On the day of we didn’t get what we paid for (literally). We were charged $7 per cloth napkin that weren’t there, $8 per person for a charcuterie board that ended up being 3 tiny plates of cheese wrapped in meat, and $4 per person for non alcoholic beverages that the staff denied my guest to have until I got there. We wanted our guest to enjoy a nice cocktail hour while he and I were taking pictures, but it ended up being a scraps hour. We also paid for beer and wine that was supposed to be set out for guest, but wasn’t and no one bothered to tell my guest that they would have to go to the bar to get drinks, my sister had to ask because she knew we paid. Before we left we were told we would be reimbursed for the beer and wine we didn’t use, but that ended up being a lie, there were 15 beers at $5 a piece and 2 bottles of wine, one was $25 and the other was $40. When I emailed her about it, she said we had guest that had an open bottle and she would be charging us $100.

If there was one thing we could have changed about our wedding, we would have gone with a different venue. Getting married at Aracely was the worst decision we made, my husband and I wish the experience hadn’t been so negative. 

When my husband and I booked Aracely as our venue, it wasn’t made clear to us that the owner would be handling all the communication. Our emails consistently went unanswered for days, and forget about calling. You have to call the restaurant, which never made a difference, considering we were always told to wait for an email response. This made the planning process immensely stressful, as we never got timely responses, even to time sensitive questions. 

We hoped that the communication would improve as our wedding date grew closer, and unfortunately it did not. We arranged for our rentals to be booked through the venue, and at one point were quoted almost double the price for a dance floor, compared to what was initially quoted. After questioning the owner, Linda, on this, she tried to brush off the pricing difference. Ultimately, she did honor the original price, but only after us bringing attention to this discrepancy multiple times. The dance floor was filthy from the moment that it was installed on our wedding day. We also rented turf for the outdoor area, and it had huge lines of tape in the middle. We would have been better off foregoing the rentals, the state they were in wasn’t acceptable.

During dinner on our wedding day, we were informed that the venue wouldn’t be cutting the cake, because we hadn’t paid for it. We had already asked Linda weeks before to invoice us for the cake cutting, which she failed to do. The last thing we expected was to be asked for a credit card, during the middle of our wedding. There were multiple other hiccups that occurred, both during the rehearsal, and the wedding day itself. Maria, the manager on site the day of, was doing her best, which we appreciated. It is clear that Linda fails to communicate to her staff, which creates numerous problems. Our poor coordinator was running around, and the lack of communication created fires for her to put out, that could’ve easily been avoided. The table our immediate family was sat at ended up getting served their entrées after all other tables had already finished theirs. Having to worry about all of these avoidable issues during our wedding made it very hard for us to be present during the day. 

We are shocked that Aracely is still in business, with the way that we were treated during the entire process. We can’t help but think about how different, and less stressful things could have been, had we gone with a competent wedding venue. When looking back on our wedding day, we do feel a bit of sadness over some aspects, that were ruined because of Aracely. We’re leaving this review in the hopes that future couples can avoid the heartache that we feel.