Choosing a Dinner Venue

We looked everywhere in our search for a suitable dinner venue. This was definitely not an easy job. We spent weeks calling the hotels and club restaurants to enquire about their wedding dinner packages.

A few places that we were initially interested in include Concorde Hotel, Equatorial Hotel and Royale Bintang Damansara (RBD). But of the three, only RBD was available on our wedding date. I tried making arrangements to meet with Angeline, who was RBD’s sales manager, but we couldn’t meet on any of our available times. This was because we could only visit her after work and she was only willing to wait till 7pm. Both our working places were not near to RBD, so we’re pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to make it there before 7pm. In addition, Angeline also doesn’t work on weekends, so that’s not helpful either.

We decided to drop by RBD to have a look anyway, even without meeting her. We checked out the banquet hall, which was beautifully grand and new but there were 2 big pillars blocking the view in the middle. We also got to try the food at the restaurant and even met the friendly Chef Tony.

I continued to check the malaysiabrides forum for possible dinner venues and found Saujana Subang. Despite my friend Stephanie’s bad review (which she told me when I was previously working in ICOM), I still called up their sales person, Jackie. She gave me the package details and it seemed rather attractive but alas, it was not available on the date that we wanted. We also visited the Legend Hotel but the function rooms were just too small and old too. We’ve been coming up against all the BUTs, but that’s just the way things have gone for us…

And that’s not it either… I ended up asking for quotations from almost all the hotels in Kuala Lumpur. I then removed those that were not available or not suitable to narrow down the choices, which makes the selection process easier.

Later, we somehow came across Bankers Club. Not knowing that it is strictly for club members only, we dropped by to meet Shangkar one evening without an appointment. He was not in and the receptionist advised us to make an appointment first. We asked to see the place and she showed us around the club premises a little. Fortunately, we were satisfied with what we saw in terms of environment and concept.

The following day, I called Shangkar again to make an appointment and after talking to him, our interest in selecting Bankers as our dinner venue grew even more. We found that the attitude of the sales person mattered a lot - we were not too happy with RBD as Angeline wasn’t flexible enough to even meet us but Shangkar was very accommodating in person (although he’s quite unresponsive to emails).

I must admit that Renaissance Hotel’s Jeffryn also gave me a very good impression but we chose Bankers Club in the end for several reasons:

1. Concept (neither a typical Chinese restaurant nor a hotel banquet)
2. Flexibility (I can even personalize my own cake!)
3. Environment (real classy and cozy ambience too)

Of course, there was always a negative side to everything - we would have to purchase the wine from Bankers as they do impose corkage. However, we were willing to accept that condition as everything else was to our satisfaction.