Rehearsing the Rehearsal Dinner

It was a wedding-packed weekend, as you can tell!

This weekend Mr. T and I tried out two of the places we're considering for our rehearsal dinner. They're both Chinese food restaurants, which is why they have banquet rooms, and they're both in our budget.

The first place was highly reviewed on Yelp. It didn't have the most updated decor, although I'm not too concerned with that. What I am concerned about is language barriers...most of the servers spoke very little English. How would I explain that some of our guests are vegetarian, pescetarian, or have celiac disease? Still, the food was great. We had steamed fish dumplings with this amazing soy ginger sauce and I had tilapia with ginger and garlic soy sauce. I said to Mr. T right before the fish came out, "I hope they don't leave the head on it," and of course they did--it's one of those restaurants. Mr. T sampled a pork dish with veggies. He thought it was tasty. I was disappointed they didn't offer brown rice, but it's a small issue in the scheme of things.

The second place wasn't as highly reviewed on Yelp. The decor was a lot more modern, and we really liked the look of the banquet area, which was off to the side of the restaurant. The problem was, we discovered, that with a party of our size (about 30 people) we couldn't be guaranteed we'd get the whole room on a Friday night...they'd try and seat people in the other part of the restaurant, but if it got too busy, we'd have strangers in the room with us. Hm. The food was good, and they had brown rice, but I'd say the other restaurant's food was slightly better. However, I wouldn't be as worried about language barrier stuff at the 2nd restaurant. We had steamed shrimp dumplings that were yummier than the fish dumplings at the first place, although the sauce wasn't as good, and I had the grilled salmon, which was a huge platter of two salmon steaks. Needless to say, I had leftovers! The salmon was yummy, if a little overcooked. Mr. T had Mongolian beef, which he liked.

So, we have one more place to try, but it's a difficult one to sample as they're only open on weekdays. I'm secretly hoping the third place is our favorite because it's the closest one to our venue...literally walking distance. But, we'll see. The other two restaurants are close, but we'd have to drive, and in both neighborhoods parking is tricky, especially on a weekend night.

Mr. T and I are both a little sick of Chinese food, needless to say, after eating it all weekend. ;-)