Featured Blog: Yes, it’s possible to have an amazing vegan menu at your Disneyland wedding!

Featured Blog on This Fairy Tale Life

When Amanda and I started dreaming of our Disney wedding we were a little nervous about the food. I had read internet posts from other couples about the food at their wedding, how amazing their dinner was, and how their guests couldn’t stop talking about it.

We were worried they might not be able to do the same justice to a vegan menu. I am a long time vegan and Amanda eats vegan at home with me but is not vegetarian. It was important to me to have a vegan dinner at our wedding that would wow our guests and show them vegan food can be just as delicious as a traditional wedding plate. Amanda was completely on board, as long as the food would be good!
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We got our contract!

It’s a super exciting and monumental week in wedding planning! We got our contract from Disney this Monday which means we get to submit our deposit, start working directly with our planner, and lock in our pricing. I don’t know what I am more excited for- getting to start planning, or getting to stop worrying that the pricing will increase!

Once we are under contract we will get some documents from Disney called “planning pages”. I don’t know exactly what they are, lol, but planning is in the title so I am sure I will love them. I am guessing it is a catalog of options available to us and pricing.

I wasn’t sure exactly what we would get in our contract but it states the minimum cost of our wedding, the pricing for our catering per head, and the pricing for our venue. It also gives us the reduced rate for our guests staying at a Disneyland resort hotel, which is awesome because it will make us better able to prepare our guests for budgeting.

So great to be finally able to take some official steps forward!

Setting our date!

We FINALLY got to make the big call to Disney to set our wedding date. We are now officially within the 18 month window where we can begin the contracting process with DFTW at Disneyland and select our date and venue!
We spoke to Sue at DFTW and went over a lot of stuff but nailed down a tentative date and location for our wedding. Sue is really great and it is easy to see why she has been a cast member for over 15 years and is the Sales Manager for DFTW in Disneyland. You can tell the entire team is very enthusiastic about all of the couples they work with and really make you feel that it is their honor to help plan your wedding.
We are waiting on approval for our chosen locations and date and if given Sue will draw up our contract. We requested to work with Michiel, a wedding planner we met at the DFTW showcase and really liked. If you don’t request a specific planner (which I think most people don’t) I think they assign you one once your contract is completed.
We decided on a late afternoon/evening ceremony in the Brisa Courtyard with our reception to follow in the Wisteria room. Some of the largest factors in determining our selection were: available ceremony start times and minimum guest count for reception venues.
We wanted our reception to end at a specific time which meant we needed a flexible ceremony start time. The Rose Court Garden had specific times ceremonies could be preformed and they didn’t work with our timeline so that helped us to determine our ceremony location… I would have been happy with either but I really do love the monorail going overhead!
Our reception choice was based more on guest count. Sleeping Beauty Pavilion requires an 80 person minimum and it was high on our list but we were not willing to increase our budget to accommodate the minimum expenditure for that space. The Trillium room which was the second pick has a 60 person minimum and that is more inline with our guest count but we really prefer the look of the Wisteria room. It limits us to 48 guests but the architecture of the room and the size make it easy to decorate in a way that will look awesome and be more affordable.
Now we just need to wait to see if we are approved!

 

Venue viewing- our latest greatest dilemma

When one decides on a Disney wedding one of the first things they look at are ceremony and reception locations. I think a lot of people decide to get married at Disneyland BECAUSE of a specific location…

When I convinced miss Amanda that there was no other place for us to get married I showed her a bunch of venue locations on the Disney Fairy Tale Weddings website. Of course the ones we really loved the most were far out of our budget… like the Animation Building, Stage 17, or the Castle forecourt…

Really if you have enough money they will let you get married anywhere… so if anyone has an extra 100-200k they want to toss towards our wedding- let me know! I have seen photos of a beautiful ceremony at Aladdin’s Oasis and they recently opened up the Train Station on Main Street for in park weddings. Unfortunately our budget puts us in a hotel, not in the park… but we still have some great options that come along with the magic and exceptional customer service of Disney.

When we looked at photos together we immediately gravitated to images from the Grand Californian Hotel. Not only do I love the vintage california woodsy feel of that hotel but it’s also a place Amanda and I have always wanted to stay someday on a splurge. I loved the option of the Brisa Courtyard, a red brick recessed circular courtyard surrounded by the hotel and woodsy foliage; where the monorail passes overhead every 18 minutes and can bring some disney magic to your ceremony. Some of the other sites looked really nice as well but that is the one I fell in love with. The indoor reception locations are not my favorite at either hotel as I don’t love the look of a conference room, but as you will see below a lot can be done to dress up a boring room.

You can have an outdoor reception but it does limit your ability to bring in DIY decor and you also can’t have characters outdoors because it causes uninvited guests at your wedding. Mickey and Minnie won’t turn away random hotel guests that want to get in line to take photos, even if you didn’t let them into your party. So I am pretty much forced to do an indoor reception… although an outdoor cocktail hour may be an option!

We didn’t even really look at the Disneyland Hotel venues as serious options because in the photos we weren’t wowed… but when we took our trip to the park for the wedding showcase a few weeks ago I told Amanda I wanted to walk over to the DLH to look at their options in person. When we saw the wedding garden we were stunned. In person it is so beautiful and romantic. The photos do not do it justice! The space is secluded and tucked away in the grounds of the Disneyland Hotel, random passersby would have to really look in to see your event- vs the brisa courtyard where everyone could look out their window or walk by on the way into Downtown Disney. That experience really put a wrench in the works… now we are very uncertain about where we should hold our ceremony. To add to the confusion we spent some time walking around the Disneyland Hotel grounds and it is truly an embodiment of Disney. I hadn’t been there since I was very young and it feels like it’s own separate land within the park- hotel land. The park has elements of vintage disney with the old disneyland sign in the pool area and a tiki bar in the central courtyard. You feel like you are wrapped in Disney magic! We wanted to try to get up to the reception venue- the Sleeping Beauty Pavilion but it took us another day to find a time when it was unoccupied. When we got in there it was hard to envision it in wedding regalia but I described to amanda how people set it up and showed her some photos. We both loved how it was circular with full windows looking out into the pool area. We thought it would not be ideal if we did a daytime wedding because too much light comes in and it would look just like a hotel ballroom.

The last (but key) consideration is the catering. We have been told that currently the banquet staff at the Grand Californian is better at tackling special dietary needs- but that could possibly change over the next few years as they do sometimes move their chefs around between the hotels. We met the Head Banquet Chef for the Grand at the Wedding Showcase and he made me feel mostly okay about what they could do for us in terms of vegan catering… I would feel uneasy if we didn’t end up working with him.

Here are some photos of locations at both hotels along with an example or two of what they look like decorated for weddings.

GRAND CALIFORNIAN HOTEL

 

DISNEYLAND HOTEL

What do you think? It is a really hard and important decision… I should add that if we choose to do our ceremony in one location we can still have our reception at a different hotel… it’s just a bit of a walk for our guests.

*I stole my wedding examples from White Rabbit Photo Boutique and DPark Photography