Food & Drink Minimums

Quite frankly, I would never book a venue with a food and beverage minimum. There is no way to guarantee you can meet it.

View Quoted Comment F&B minimum is really standard for venues that are restaurants. Since they are closing either a large section of the restaurant, or the entire restaurant to the public, they need to ensure their profits. Ours has a minimum and we know exactly how much we will be spending - x of each specific hors d’oeuvres, x meals, x people for open bar, x people for cake, x people for champagne toast, and so on. If you have a smaller size party, you just upgrade the bar, add hors d’oeuvres and late night snacks etc. It’s all determined ahead of time. You just to need price out before you book to determine if it will be reasonable for your guest count.

This sounds a little pricey to me given you’re only having 50 people, but not totally crazy for a HCOL area. I exclusively looked at restaurant venues (in the DC area) for Saturdays and F&B minimums ranged from 25k-40k (!!), plus 24% service charge plus 6% tax in VA or 10% tax in DC.

View Quoted Comment Yeah, I don’t think some people realize that booking a venue — whether for 50 or 1000 people— still means that business will only have one event happening for the night so they’ll have to ensure they meet the threshold to make profits. Especially with restaurants. Restaurants can typically turn tables within an hour. So a table can have 5 different dining groups come through within a 5-hour timeframe on a Saturday night while with an event, it means that 5-hour timeframe will have the same guests occupying that table the whole time.

That minimum seems extremely steep for 50 guests. One of the venues we were considering had a flat minimum regardless of guests, and we decided to go with another venue so that we could have more flexibility.