Rehearse Eating Dinner? Yes!

One of the things I'm looking forward to most with this wedding, besides actually getting married, is all of the eating activities. There are all types of excuses to scarf down food. Besides the dinner at your reception, you can fill up on good food pretty much from throughout the entire wedding planning process. Engagement dinners, multiple bridal showers, bridal luncheons and of course, the rehearsal dinner. Ah, the rehearsal dinner. I don't know why most people only have one, I think I'll need a few rehearsals to perfect my yummy face.

Early on, we considered having it at a great Mexican restaurant a few blocks from Mr. Warbs' parents house. Since they're regulars, the owners gave them a really good deal that included pitchers of margaritas, beer and platters upon platters of food. My kind of party! But, it wouldn't have worked out logistically. The Mexican restaurant is in Whittier which is nearly 60 miles away from Malibu. So our options were to have the rehearsal dinner Thursday, have the actual rehearsal on Friday and the wedding on Saturday. There was way too much back and forth involved in that plan. We could also have had the dinner a couple of weeks before the wedding, but that just seemed odd to me. It just made more sense to have the dinner in the Malibu area. No enchiladas for us.

We checked out a few over priced restaurants before we settled on Buca di Beppo. Family style Italian food. For those not familiar with Buca, their food portions look like this:

Yum. Get in my mouth!

Image via ashleysbrideguide.com

Those are huge plates! Although you can get individual plates, most of the food is made for sharing. I'm a big fan of family style dining, because its bound to get everyone talking which is sometimes a problem at these events. "Hey, hand me that plate of chicken parm over there!" "Aunt Sally, stop hogging all of the lasagna!" Or something a little more friendly.

We figured that with the huge portion and our small bridal party, we could really get the most for our money. And our stomachs. Remember, we're big eaters. We've dined at the restaurant enough times to try a fair amount of the delicious menu. In my opinion, it's one of the better chain Italian restaurants. I love the stuffed shells and baked rigatoni. And pretty much everything on the menu.Yum.

After perusing their website, we found that they regularly accommodate large parties of 20 or more. They host all kinds of wedding events, even bachelorette parties.It was pretty easy to make the reservation with their catering manager, who advised us to select the menu before hand to cut down on costs. She also gave me an idea of how many servings a dish yielded so we could determine how much food we needed. For example, a large order of garlic bread serves 16 people. Super helpful! The best part is that the restaurant is only ten minutes away from the hotel, so we don't have to worry about too much driving. We're pretty confident that it's going to be a hit!

What kind of rehearsal dinner are you having? Formal or casual?