Morris Inn at University of Notre Dame Reviews

Our reception at the Morris Inn was perfect. It is SUCH a beautiful place. It's just spectacular. I'll never forget the feeling of walking into the Smith Ballroom for the first time and seeing everything set up. It was breathtaking. The staff and coordinator at the Morris Inn are fantastic! Very professional, organized and easy to communicate with. Also, the food was AMAZING! I had several people tell me that they'd never been to a wedding where everything they ate was delicious! I highly recommend the Morris Inn as a reception venue! It's top-notch!

We had our wedding reception at McKenna Hall Dining Room catered by the Morris Inn. The food was so delicious! We served a choice of chicken breast with lemon caper sauce and sunfish with mango buerre blanc. Both were yummy. Maryanne, the wedding planner, did an absolutely wonderful job of making everything run smoothly. The tables were decorated even beyond our expectations. The food was served on time and was the appropriate temperature. There were plenty of friendly servers. It was all the extra little touches that were so wonderful. And the price was very reasonable.

Overall, a great place to have a wedding. I had trouble getting in touch with Dawn, my wedding coordinator, before the event but once I met her she got everything done. They did a wonderful job setting up the room, and the food was delicious. Much better than catering by design. The bridal suite was wonderful too- overall a great location!

The Morris Inn is the better of the on-campus catering options at Notre Dame. It is much better than Catering by Disaster. That being said:
- it's overpriced. The food is delicious, the service is great, the venues are fine, but it's still overpriced compared to what you could get off-campus. We had a simpler chicken dish and we still ended up paying about $50 for each guest.
- The food is delicious though. The food is delicious.
- Pretty responsive, though only one woman is in charge of the weddings and she may not always be available through phone, and less through email
- They work great with Cher of Merry Me events
- The service is great. This is probably not a constant though, since the staff is on-call and not regularly employed. As a student I used to wait these tables at these events, so if you are not okay with random townies and college students I would use another venue off-campus

- They are willing to provide different things off the catering menu, or create a dish for you, but it gets super, super expensive. Also, they are not so hot about moving around tables in the rooms from where they're used to keeping them. I wanted to have my placecards around my cake, and they insisted on having them outside the door. Not a huge deal, but surprised that it was to them
- They only provide round tables.

- A biggie: they have a really lame selection of linens. You get white tablecloths, and a choice of white napkins...or standard, ND blue and gold napkins. They do not provide, nor are they able to provide different colors or linen types. Also, they do not provide chair covers. I had to get different linens from my florist to spice up the look of the hall.
- Another biggie: they allow you to taste two entrees you are interested before selecting your menu. We had our chicken dish, which was stellar, and our vegetarian dish, which was stellar...at the tasting. The day of the wedding, the dish was not the same. We ordered veggie tortes that were baked in a phyllo dough, and the day of, the phyllo dough was missing and I just got the veggies.

Cool stuff:
- The McKenna Hall dining room has a built-in projector that you can use for a slideshow
- The room has a great internet connection. We used this to stream our reception on the internet :)

This is probably my hardest review to write...the Morris Inn post-renovation is a beautiful location. But we had a wonderful wedding IN SPITE of, not BECAUSE OF the Morris Inn. Simply put, they have a captive audience. There are hundreds of ND weddings every year, and hundreds more that wished they could have gotten the date. There are SO MANY things about Notre Dame that are very well run. But the Morris Inn isn't one of them. I had been in touch with the events group prior to even securing my wedding date, so we had ample communication, but nevertheless, the following issues ensued: 1) after asking for contract updates, we were provided with a blank contract template instead. 2) we weren't informed until 5 months before the wedding (over a year after first contact) that certain menu options are only available to certain packages. There were no designations on any menu sheets before then. 3) despite signing a contract stating we would have 3 menu choices, they tried to tell us that we could only have 2. 4) less than a month before the wedding, my husband's night-before room was canceled because the booking department thought it was a duplicate (same name as his dad). 5) night of the wedding, the top TWO layers of our cake were not cut, despite us saying to cut everything (tiny slices given to all of our guests). 6) I was looking forward to the Jameson glazed salmon with colcannon for my meal...but they put PEAS in the colcannon! Not there when we sampled! And the bread rolls were spicy. Trying too hard to be "fancy" when they should just stick with basics.