A Modern Rehearsal Dinner for a Mexican Wedding

When you're planning a wedding, you're not just planning for that one big day. You're planning for the months, weeks, days leading up to the wedding. A lot of times, this includes all those extra pre-wedding events: engagement parties, showers, bachelor(ette) parties, etc. This is something that I've thoroughly enjoyed cuz Lord knows I love me some party time! Actually, I really just love the opportunity to spend some quality time with my favorite peeps. Who doesn't, right?

But anyway, one of those pre-wedding events that I'm totally looking forward to is our rehearsal dinner. We finally crossed this bad boy off our To-Do list and we're so excited for it! Our approach to the rehearsal dinner was to make it as completely opposite as possible from our traditional Mexican wedding. We've put so much focus on keeping our wedding traditional and Mexican that we wanted to let loose a little. We were thinking something modern, trendy, hip, sleek, LA...know what I mean?


We immediately crossed any Mexican restaurants off our list which eliminated, ohhhh, 50% (?) of our restaurant choices in Los Angeles. Then, we wanted to keep our rehearsal dinner near downtown. Our church is pretty much located in downtown LA, so we thought that minimizing drive time would be a good idea. I dunno about you, but when I know that a good meal awaits me, I want to eat..like NOW. No time to wait for food. Feed me.

I really gotta hand it to my boy, yelp, for pulling through and helping us find our restaurant. You know that interactive map on the right hand side of the screen that shows you your search results? Looks a lil something like this:


I pretty much used that to search for all the restaurants listed near our area of choice. I came across a listing that caught my eye. 4.5 stars, 100+ reviews, less than 1 mile away from our church. Whaaat! Apparently, two recent USC grads (figures!) opened a Venetian style wine bar to bring something new to downtown. An Italian tapas and wine: I was all over it! I immediately emailed the restaurant and heard a response from the owner right away. A couple emails back and forth to negotiate, and a visit with Mr. Tortolito to officially check out the spot was all it took to book Bacaro LA.


A view of the inside of Bacaro LA. Theres a crazy display of empty wine bottles on the ceiling.


A sample of their menu (written on a chalkboard wall):

{Photos from yelp}

We'll be serving our guests a combination of their Italian tapas and, of course, wine! I hope this provides a good diversion from all of the Mexican food they'll be stuffing their faces with at the wedding.

What was your strategy in choosing a rehearsal dinner spot?