u/Educational-Air-4833

Can anyone recommend a venue that hosts ceremonies and cocktail hour only? We’ll be having our reception at a restaurant so we want to have our ceremony to be somewhere separate.

A lot of places we looked at only have the capacity to seat no more than 75 people. We have 100 guests & our budget is 5k. Not sure if that’s feasible but happy to hear some suggestions!

So far I’ve looked into the following:

- Peoples Gas Pavillion (we like it but we don’t really like the public park aspect of it)

- Cheney Mansion (considering this option but we don’t love how you can see cars on the street surrounding the property. Plus we would like to stay closer to the city)

- Midland hotel (The White walls and gold accents isn’t really our vibe but we still are considering it given the price)

- Assumption church (I think this one might be our top choice but still want to look for other options)

My fiancé and I recently moved to Chicago for work and are planning our wedding here but all of our family and friends are from out of town, so most guests will be flying in from across the country.

We have our heart set on a cathedral ceremony and a jazz club reception. The problem is that the church we want only does ceremonies on Fridays and Saturdays, which triggers a $10k weekend surcharge at our reception venue. That’s not a cost we’re willing to absorb, so we’re scraping the church wedding to make a Sunday wedding more financially feasible for us.

Option 1:
Labor Day weekend (Sunday)

Guests would have Monday off, which softens the travel burden. The downside: our preferred jazz club isn’t available, and the alternative venue charges around 44% on top of everything (gratuity, tax, admin fees, credit card fees). Not where we want to put our money.

Option 2:
a regular Sunday

We get the jazz club we actually want. The trade-off is that guests would need to take Monday off work to travel back home and we feel bad about that.

We’d love to hear from anyone who’s been through this. whether you planned a Sunday wedding or attended one as an out-of-town guest. Was it a dealbreaker? Any regrets?