Nord Social Hall @ French Meadow

Mismanagement and lack of communication

We hosted our cocktail style Wedding Reception here in June and felt it was woefully mismanaged from start to finish. We booked all three rooms back in Fall of ‘23 and paid our deposit and were excited to get planning come May this year. We got to a month before the event and hadn’t heard anything from the Event Coordinator regarding current menu, bar, timing, anything. Three weeks prior to the event we reached out and heard nothing for a week. Two weeks out we followed up and found out the Event Coordinator had changed from the one we booked with and the new one was out for an indeterminate period of time with a family emergency. We worked as best we could with the Event Captain but ended up with incorrect menus and pricing and were finally told the Event Coordinator would be back the Monday of our event week and it would be handled then. We got finalized menus and pricing 36 hours before our event. This was extremely stressful, however, we empathized with the Event Coordinator and were assured the event itself would be great. On the day, we arrived and the staff setting up was unsure how many chairs we wanted. They didn’t know which equipment we had paid for to use that needed to be set up. They didn’t know what the event was for. They were all very nice and let us know they had extremely limited information about our event which was very concerning for us. The Event Coordinator was present for about 5 mins to ask us about a backup wine if ours ran out and that was it (it did run out because there was only one bottle). There was no Event Captain, and the Coordinator was not on hand and (according to staff) unreachable during the event. We had agreed upon several things including a finite amount to pay for “open bar” and then switching to card after that point and we found out only AFTER we met our minimum that they were never told/weren’t prepared to take cards. At that point, our options were no drinks (N/A or otherwise) for the last 3 hours or so of our event or we could just keep paying. So we ended up paying much more than was quoted/agreed upon due to lack of communication/oversight. We were told that guests could visit the attached Blue Stem bar, but it closed two hours before our event ended. We also had guests with dietary preferences/restrictions and had ordered vegan options and gluten free cake. We had asked if these could be explicitly labeled to avoid confusion and were told “yes” and on the day it did not happen so many of our guests were unaware there was anything they could eat at our reception. We were also told we could take our leftovers home and we only got cake when there was a lot of food left when they took it away. The sternos were out for some period of time and we couldn’t find someone to help with that. The bar was left unattended. The bartenders were serving and refilling alcohol table to table (which we did not want or ask for), and did not pass appetizers as agreed upon. We reached out to the owner, twice, following our event to discuss our concerns to no avail. We LOVE French Meadow and are just heartbroken to have had this experience with them. Posting this (very lengthy) review in hopes no one else goes through this expensive disappointment.