Foregoing an actual reception?

As long as you are hosting them in some way, the reception doesn't need to have the dances and whatever. A dinner at a restaurant after the ceremony is perfect.

We had initially planned on doing this for our destination wedding as well! There are a lot of benefits to it- no time or money spent on decor, no need to hire a wait or bar staff, no clean up after, and a much larger variety of food to choose from! Not to mention the food is oftentimes better at an upscale restaurant than it is at a reception, and there is no 20% “service fee” (still haven’t figured out what the heck this entails, only that it is NOT the tip!?), so the tab usually ends up smaller! Plus the obvious huge savings from not needing to hire a DJ. If you go this route, I would highly suggest simply making reservations for X amount of people and NOT saying that it is wedding related in anyway! As soon as places hear the word “wedding”, they try to change up the rules- suddenly they want to charge you an extra fee to rent out a private room, and have you order off a special limited menu (less choices, more expensive).

That’s a great idea! That was our Plan C if Covid restrictions didn’t allow for our Plan B to happen.

Providing dinner and drinks is still a reception. As long as you’re hosting your guests, this is totally fine!

For that small a crowd a nice dinner at a restaurant would be great. Get a private room at the restaurant, let everyone order off the menu, it will be intimate and fun.

View Quoted Comment Agree with this.

Sounds fine to me. It's still hosting. I would go for it

As long as you’re hosting the dinner for your guests, that’s a reception!

As long as you're providing dinner and drinks, that's a reception in and of itself! My best friend did this with her destination micro-wedding of 17 people and we had a great time.

Thank you! I definitely am thinking this is going to be the route we go. While we aren't on a restrictive budget, the more we save the better-and it is seeming like a good way to host but not be locked in to minimums we can't meet.