Buca di Beppo Italian Restaurant

We recently held our small wedding reception at this location on 2/18/12 and I would absolutely NOT recommend this restaurant to anyone with ANY kind of party. First off, if you want to make a reservation for a celebration they make you sign a contract. You damn well better make sure that EVERYTHING they verbally promise you is put into that contract. The lady we talked to on the phone, Jennifer, said the rooms were "semi-private" and "partitioned" meaning that they were off to the side and that we would have our own space to mull about and have our little party. We all showed up after the wedding and from the get-go, it was a bad experience. Our tables weren't ready so everyone had to hang out in the packed lobby for 15 minutes (it was February and quite chilly outside so that was really our only option besides sitting in our cars). When they called us back, our "room" would have been great for a party but they had sat 3 additional tables in there with us! Instead of letting us spread out and sit comfortably amongst the booths and tables, they crammed as many of us as they could into these long booth/table combinations so that anytime anyone in the booth area had to get up to go to the bathroom, the entire side of the table had to shuffle about. When we asked the manager about this, he denied that they even offered private rooms (though I passed many on our walk through the restaurant). Instead of checking with the sales coordinator, he made us pull up our contract on our phone right there so he could point out that the contract does not specifically guarantee us a "private" room only that they reserve the right to make changes and only attempt to honor our seating requests. We decided to just sit down, shut up, and make the best of it. Our servers were nice and the food was good but the whole thing just felt rushed. We were still able to get up, have a little toast, and hang out but you could tell the other 3 tables in there with us felt really awkward about having to share their space with a party that they were clearly intruding on (though it was no fault of their own). When it came time to pay the bill, the jerk-manager begrudgingly gave us a discount for the inconvenience. My sister and I noticed that this included a reduction in the servers' tip. When we asked jerk-manager about it he looked quite disgusted and made the snide comment that "everyone is going to have to suffer for this." I found it to be absolutely unacceptable that the poor waitstaff who makes $2.13 an hour had to suffer for their mismanagement so in the end we left them a rather large tip. They couldn't clear us out of there fast enough, while we were all trying to get our coats and say good-bye, we were having to dodge busboys slinking through trying to clean so they could seat another large party. We ended up going with Buca because Maggiano's required a much larger reservation fee for an actual private room. In retrospect, I wish we would have gone with them, the price would have been worth not having to put up with that manager.