City Hall, Dumplings, and Magic: How I Flipped the Script on My Manhattan Wedding

It’s often said that you don’t throw a wedding for yourself, you throw it for other people. Joel and I took issue with this—if we were going to get married, we wanted to have fun with it. Because we’re not religious, nor do we have any rigid family traditions (or rigid family members), we were free to do our own thing. We did have two guidelines, however: We wanted it to be in Manhattan and we didn’t want it to bankrupt us.

I’ve always felt like a city hall bride, which neatly took care of the ceremony. But to pull off the reception, we had to let go of any costly wedding conventions that didn’t speak to us—paper invitations, flowers, even the cake. This allowed us to focus on what we love most about weddings: the dinner, drinks, and dressing up.

With that in mind, we set out looking for a restaurant that could host our wedding party, taking inventory of our favorite places with private dining rooms. I had been going to Café China, a Sichuan hideaway on the edge of Murray Hill, for more than a decade. When it reopened on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan two years ago, around when Joel and I first started dating, it quickly became a beloved shared spot. The restaurant felt a bit out of time—think hanging tasseled lamps, vintage posters of Chinese movie stars, dark wood and jade-colored walls. Even the drinks menu, with cocktails named after Wong Kar-wai films, was designed to charm. And this is to say nothing of the food, which is always excellent. Joel and I tend toward the crowd-pleasers: pillowy pork dumplings, scallion pancakes, Dan Dan noodles, fried rice with mustard greens, and sautéed string beans; we always walk away extremely happy.

As it turns out, on the third floor of Café China is a rather large event space with a corner bar and four dining rooms, one of which is a framed by a showstopper circular window overlooking 37th Street. We were already planning an intimate party, but the floor’s capacity (76 seated) put a finer point on it.

Putting the rest together was rather simple: We weren’t bogged down by picking out tablescapes (the space was already quite chic) or doing tastings (we just multiplied our standard order and, in lieu of the cake, brought in stellar ice cream sandwiches from Nightingale). The challenge was: How do we give this wedding a sense of ceremony without an actual ceremony? Searching for an alternative to exchanging vows, my mind flicked back to one of my favorite movies, When Harry Met Sally, and all those scenes of elderly couples sitting next to each other, telling their story. Joel and I ended up doing something quite similar, recalling our first dates and the moment we knew we were it for each other—but to approximate the big “I do,” we ended our little spiel with a smooch.