Hey ladies, I am an Austin knottie but just attended a wedding in Houston and there were some things that happened that if I was a bride who was. planning a wedding there I would want to know about.
First the pros:
The space is large, I think there were 250-300 people there and we didn't feel cramped at all. The foyer area is very pretty for the cocktail hour and they have this fun stairway if you want to use it to make your entrance. The food was pretty good for wedding food and the service was prompt.
On to the cons: (This in no way is a reflection on my friend, the bride. She obviously put a lot of work and thought into her day and I think the glitches were things that she could not of possibly forseen. I just wanted to throw that out there in case I sounded like I was slamming my friend). The biggest con is parking. There is a valet service which sounds nice but it took me over 45 min to park. The delay seemed to come in that there only seemed to be 2 people parking cars and the rest were standing around talking. By the time I made it up to the reception I had missed the entire cocktail hour. They also told us when we parked that our parking would be validated when we got to the wedding. I assumed that this meant that there would be no charge on leaving but this wasn't true. The validation meant the parking was $8 which might not of been a big deal if they had taken something other than cash. We had to get out of line, find an ATM and get back in line to get our car. This took another 30 min plus.
The second concern that I had was the way that they handled the cash bar. Without debating the concept of a cash bar, the first thing you see when you walk into the reception is an employee sitting with a cash box and a price list. Then you had to wait in line to buy a ticket and then wait in another line to buy a drink. The whole process seemed a bit off putting and took forever.
Anyway, I'm sure that these are details that could be worked out if you knew about them in advance so I thought I would share.
-b