Really cute venue, but so many challenges for a wedding and reception.
We booked our wedding at Reader Rock Garden, and our reception at Reader's Garden Cafe. We were really excited to book our big day at a favorite place of ours, and loved the idea of having the ceremony and reception all in one place. There were a few great things about Reader's Garden Cafe. The cocktails and the appetizers were really wonderful, and they were served out on the lawn, with nice little cocktail tables set up.
However, there were many challenges with the cafe. Logistically, our wedding was on a hot day, and there is no air conditioning in the cafe, which was something we didn't think of initially. If you book the bride's room to get ready upstairs, it is even more uncomfortable up there. Right from the start, the management of the cafe was difficult to work with and inflexible in almost all aspects of our reception. This included where we could have tables and our seating chart, whether we could provide our own wine for a corkage fee, whether we could have a projector and small screen inside the building, and other small things. They offered us a corkage fee, but later increased it on us after the wine had been ordered, and were very difficult to communicate with about why this had happened. We had to really fight for them to honour the original price they had provided us, and it was not a great situation. Ultimately, one of our guests had a cardiac arrest during our cocktail hour and the cafe did not have an AED on site. This has been rectified now by the City of Calgary, but it was a very bad situation.
It is too bad, because we really loved the idea of having our reception on site after our ceremony, and partnering with Reader's Garden Cafe for it. But, after the fact, we really felt like the cafe didn't have much interest in weddings, and were not eager to accommodate much of our day. A wedding is a stressful enough day without having to field so many constant, small issues leading up to it, and on the day of. I hope that others who decide to book here have a better experience than we did.