The Prado Weddings & Events

The Prado is one of the top places to hold your corporate or wedding event. I’ve been a photographer in San Diego for over 10 years and it’s one of my favorite venues to photograph at. The historical buildings and views are the perfect blend of class and sophistication for any event.

I had my wedding at The Prado at Balboa Park on 9÷25÷15. The ceremony was held in the Moro del Rey Gardens and reception in the Grand Ballroom. Guest count was 110 and the event was from 6:00-midnight. It was everything I could have dreamed of and more. Initially, I found The Prado on The Knot. If you think the pictures are gorgeous, wait until you see it in person. On the day of the wedding, the venue was transformed even more. I started planning 1 year prior to our wedding date. Throughout the process, I worked with Mary DiMento. When we first were in contact, I knew she had incredible patience because I changed my wedding date a handful of times. She was gracious with each time. Throughout the process, Mary answered every question precisely and in a timely manner. She gave honest, real responses. Mary ABSOLUTELY knows what she is doing, is organized and efficient. As the wedding approached, I trusted her opinion on lighting, décor, setup, because she has done so many weddings there. The day of the wedding, I hardly saw Mary, but I know it was because she was keeping her staff on-​point and organized to the max. The entire day ran so smoothly and there was not one hiccup. During the cocktail hour, drinks were hosted on the venue. The hors d’oeuvres were fantastic and wait staff was incredible attentive. The dinner was FANTASTIC and I keep thinking about my Sea Bass. Our guests raved about the food and the service, as there is an art to how the food is presented at The Prado. My husband and I had our own waitress who would constantly refill our drinks and take care of any needs. We had an open bar and the bartenders were SO fast that the wait times were brief for a drink. Besides the food, the venue is incredibly beautiful. We chose pin-​lighting on each table and uplighting (from our DJ but they also provide at The Prado if needed) which set the mood. The gold chiavari chairs that are provided are rich looking. With our guest count, I was concerned the ballroom might have felt overwhelmingly big, however it was perfect. We had 11 tables which filled the space nicely, and provided great space for a dance floor. I could go on for days raving about this venue because to me, it was perfection. The entire staff is organized, efficient and timely which makes the planning and wedding day go smoothly. HIGHLY recommend.

We had our rehearsal dinner here because we like to go to The Prado whenever we have anything to celebrate. The person we were working with actually left her position just days before our date, but the special events team stepped in where she left off and everything went smoothly.
I love the short ribs at The Prado and this was on the menu we chose. I liked that their options included meals for the kids since mostly my young nieces and nephews prefer chicken strips to fine dining. It also helped with our budget.
It’s easy to create a budget by using the menus they have available which is a three-​course meal at different price points depending on the top of entrees you choose. You can then add alcohol or have each person of your party pay individually for drinks ordered.
We were seated on the patio outside, near the edge, which was perfect for our group because it was a nice atmosphere, but not so quiet that anyone was disrupted from the kids in our group. It was beautiful evening, so I’m glad we reserved to sit outdoors.
The space is beautiful no matter what you’re here for, but I would definitely go The Prado special events route again if I needed to plan a party.

This was our dream wedding venue. We had our ceremony in the garden fountain area which was gorgeous, cocktail hour in the courtyard, and reception in the ballroom. Everything was amazing from the service to the food and drinks. Rachael Wilkerson was so fantastic. Each time I reached out to her, she responded in a timely manner and was so accommodating. She truly made me feel at ease as if nothing I requested was a problem. How lucky the Prado is to have her! Everyone raved at the beauty of the venue and how amazing the food was. It all went off without a hitch! Definitely worth it.

I just had my ceremony at the wishing well and my reception in the Loggia room this past Saturday and it went without a hitch. Everything was perfect!
We worked with Rachael and she’s such a pleasure to work with! I feel like I bombarded her with so many questions, but she was always patient with me. The venue was perfect and we couldn’t have asked for any better. The food was consistent with what’s served at the restaurant and everyone was raving about it to us afterwards.
What we loved. and was quite entertaining was when the food was served, the servers did a lil ‘dance’ around the tables. they’d circle the table, look at each other, then put the plates of food down at the same time. LOVE IT.
The Loggia room has 2 terraces, perfect for a bar on one side and a photobooth on the other. Great views too. Room fits 80 people, so 8 tables, a semi round sweetheart table. It was a perfect size for a ‘small’ wedding with just enough room for dancing.
As for the ceremony, the wishing well area was the perfect setting. It was a hot day, but they had umbrellas up to keep our guests cool as well as a water station.
Loved everything about this venue.

Back in 1980, my husband and I were married in front of the wishing well on the terrace at what is now the Prado — and two weeks ago we were back in the same spot, celebrating our 35^th anniversary. I cannot say enough about how amazing our event was — it was literally perfect.
The food was delicious — our guests talked about it for days afterwards — and the set-​up on the terrace was lovely.
Every single person from the Prado worked like crazy to make our event wonderful, and every single person was more than pleasant and more than helpful.
It turned out to be a warm day and my husband asked one of the busboys if he would move an umbrella so that it shaded one of our guests a little better. Instead of just moving the umbrella, the guys very discreetly brought in more umbrellas so that all the guests were in the shade… without being asked. All the staff was like that — they watched everything and noticed way before we did if something needed to be done.
Many thanks to Marcy and the whole crew — you helped make our anniversary celebration incredibly special.

We had a small wedding (20 people) and booked the Sala Del Ray room to host a dinner for our guests afterwards. The evening could not have gone more perfectly. The room looked beautiful when we arrived. Our server was so sweet and very patient with trying to sneak in between all of the toasts (too many toasts – people started making impromptu ones). The food was soooo delicious – everyone was really happy with what they ordered and kept remarking on how good everything was. The entire evening went so smoothly, which allowed us to relax and enjoy ourselves and feel confident that our guests were having a good time. I am so glad we were able to spend our wedding dinner at The Prado and will recommend it very highly to anyone who asks.

We just had our wedding here this past weekend and have been working with Mary the catering manager for a year. Every step of the way, she was very very helpful, patient, and nice to us. She offered insight when we asked and was very flexible with us. She heard our needs and helped make our wedding a success! She was easy to get a hold of whenever we needed her or had questions. Truly an amazing experience and our guests loved it! Thank you Mary and the rest of the Prado staff!

My wedding couldn’t have been anymore perfect.
After touring a vast assortment of venues, I knew this was the one. The ceremony site is beautiful (placed below the outside patio at a reflection pool and wishing well) while the reception was upstairs in the Loggia room. This room is architecturally stunning– Spanish tile, lots of windows, hand painted blue beams adorning the ceiling, and two MASSIVE balconies that guests can walk out on and see the entire interior of the park lit up at night. We set the bar up on one and had rented furniture on the other
All of the food served was straight from The Prado so I am proud to say I am one of the select few who has served good wedding food. There’s a huge assortment to choose from to please all sizes of weddings and cuisine types. You can also choose to have food brought in from any of the other Cohn restaurants. We haven’t stopped getting compliments on the food and it’s 6 months later! The synchronized serving for each table is also a classy touch.
What really made the entire experience doable was their coordinator Marcy, who listened to all of our needs, worked within our budget, and helped execute the perfect wedding. When we said we couldn’t afford the standard wedding package and were going to have to look elsewhere, she came up with a way to book the room as a banquet and just cut a couple of the standard things (champagne toast– who cares it was open bar anyway and tray passed hors d’œuvre– people walked up to them and served themselves). She listened to any concerns we had, gave us advice on vendors, and was always very prompt about reminding us of deadlines and answering any questions. I couldn’t have been happier!
The day of your wedding you’re never sure how everything is going to come together and I was a bit nervous. That was immediately put to rest the second I saw how perfect everything turned out. They know their stuff and make sure it’s an unforgettable experience. Very LGBT friendly too!

We were married in the gardens and had our reception in the Alhambra room. The setting is just gorgeous and the entire area is well-​maintained. Anywhere you want to take a picture the background is perfect wherever you are!
Rachael Wilkerson was our catering manager and she was awesome! I was bugging her constantly with questions and she was always quick to respond. Rachael was very professional and friendly and offered advice without being pushy… her ideas were perfect too!
The day of the wedding she helped us out so much, we cannot thank her enough. Rachael helped corral everyone and keep things going smoothly and ensured the best outcome!
Would highly recommend The Prado for any event where you want beauty and an awesome staff.

What’s one of the biggest complaints about weddings? Mediocre food.
Here’s an easy solution to that — choose a restaurant as your venue! Sort of.
Here’s the great thing about having your wedding at the Prado — you get all the advantages of an event venue like a hotel ballroom, plus the benefits of a restaurant’s expertise with food and dining service.
The Prado is well set up for weddings — with their beautiful garden for ceremonies, and a grand ballroom for dinner receptions (and other venue spaces for smaller parties). But it’s also a bustling restaurant and bar. They do a pretty good job of keeping those things separate, but they don’t shut down the restaurant or anything for your wedding. So it’s possible that diners will have a nice view of your wedding ceremony in the garden. If you don’t mind strangers overhearing your vows, there is no down side to getting married at the wishing well. And I didn’t mind. In fact, I reveled in the extra attention. After all, my makeup and hair looked great and I was wearing a fabulous dress. I hope people took pictures.
In fact, if you were at the Prado on ¹⁄₁₇ this year and took pictures of a stranger’s wedding — that was me! Please post your pics here and message me. OK, back to the Prado…
If you ARE the sort of bride who would prefer privacy, I would recommend having your ceremony next door at the Japanese Friendship Garden and then moving over to the Prado for your cocktail reception and dinner/​dancing.
The courtyard is perfect for a cocktail reception. It’s pretty, and I love the fountain.
And the Grand Ballroom — I can’t think of a better place to have a party. We booked a band, and the stage was perfect to show them off.
Every guest told me how delicious the food was. (A guy who hates salad said he loved THIS salad — the Prado Pressed Salad.)
The Prado’s synchronized service is also SO IMPRESSIVE. Many of my guests (including me) had never seen that before at a wedding. Actually, I might have seen it in a movie once. Something with Julie Andrews, or English royalty.
Wanna feel like English royalty on your wedding day? Surrounded by Spanish architecture? Eating fresh California cuisine?
What, you’re not interested? Oh, too bad. Better keep looking.

On the day we were venue shopping for our Wedding, the Prado was first on our LONG list of places and I have to be honest from first glance, we were not sold, maybe because we just we wanted to see what else was out there… But then we met the wonderful Mary DiMento and she walked us thru the entire venue and gave us amazing vision on all the different ways we can plan our wedding with a lot of the main components all in house. She made you feel very confident that our wedding would be everything we imagined. After the tour, when we got back in the car to head to the next venue, my Fiancée said «I don’t want to see anything else, That’s where I’m getting married». I said «Oh Thank God! Me too»:) We called Mary the next day and booked it. Thanks Mary. :)

My sister got married last week and held her dinner reception at «Sala Del Rey» at the Prado. We had the pleasure of working with Rebecca in the sales office, who was so wonderful from the beginning of the process until the final moment. Rebecca was very quick to answer every question we sent via email and made sure we had all pricing and menu info confirmed before the wedding, so there would be no surprises on the day of the reception.
The day of the reception, my mom and I came in early to set up flowers and other arrangements we had brought for the wedding. I needed some ribbon and other things and Rebecca was extremely helpful in getting me the tools I needed to make sure I could set up in time for the dinner. She made sure we were satisfied with the room setup (which was beautiful) and was very accommodating in making sure we had the appropriate table for the cake setup. It was so nice working with someone as efficeinet, friendly and professional as Rebecca. The wedding was a complete success!
At the dinner reception, Steve assisted our wedding party of 26 and went out of his way to make sure everything was perfect Steve made sure everyone’s glasses were always full of wine or water and he never seemed bothered with any of our many requestes. He made a real effort to interact with the guests and make sure the bride and groom enjoyed themselves. Steve even helped us find a way to pack up the top cake tier (we misplaced the box the bakery left during the cake setup) for the bride/​groom to take home. I really appreciated Steve helping us take all remaining items to the car, after the dinner. He was really a big help and is such a valuable asset to the Prado.
In addition to the beautiful setup provided by the Prado, the food was fabulous. For dinner, we had wedge salad and mustard-​bread crumb crusted pork roast. The food and presentation were delicious! I highly recommend the Prado for anyone looking to host a wedding or other event.

We got married at The Prado on ⁹⁄₆. The ceremony was in the garden, and the reception in the Loggia Room. We had a small wedding of 65 people, so I was extremely excited when I discovered we would comfortably fit (with a dance floor) in the Loggia room. It has beautiful décor, and two large patios overlooking the museum of man and the sunset.
For me, it really doesn’t get much better than The Prado. We live in Banker’s Hill, and have watched couples getting married there for years. When it was our turn, we were willing to go over our budget to make it happen. The planning process was wonderful. Rachael was very helpful, and promptly responded to my many emails. It also helped that so many of our vendors had worked with The Prado before. Balboa Park has so many great photo opportunities.
The Wedding Day itself was truly magical. The Prado works like a fine tune machine, and they really don’t miss a beat. The food was incredible as well!

We had our wedding at the Prado on 8÷23÷14 and we could not have imagined a more beautiful wedding. The food was AMAZING, the grand ball room was beautiful, and our ceremony area at the wishing well was GREAT. Everyone from the wedding event coordinators to the table bussers were fantastic, helpful and professional. #1 place in San Diego to get married in our opinion.

I’m a professional photographer in San Diego, and I have to say that if you’re looking for the complete package this is your location. I’ve photographed many weddings here over the last 15 years and it is hands down one of my favorite locations.
The ceremony sites are beautiful and you have several choices in room sizes for your reception. The small rooms as well as the large Grand Ballroom are all great from a photographic perspective. Cocktail hour in the courtyard is fun and picturesque.
Photographically speaking, The Prado/​Balboa is one of the more photogenic places in San Diego in my opinion. The backgrounds are amazing, the lighting is awesome because of all the structures and trees (lighting is huge when it comes to photography, especially portraits), and there are endless possibilities when it comes to what the photographer can do for you.
The staff in the catering department is very helpful and beyond friendly, and the food is… well, it’s the Prado… it’s some of the best food you can serve at a wedding in San Diego.
The Prado for your wedding is pretty much a no-​brainer.

We had our wedding here and it was amazing. We were married by the Wishing Well. I had a single trumpet play before I walked out to a string quartet playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D. It was a lovely walk, and we had a beautiful pomander of dark red peonies and roses hanging from the Wishing Well. I felt like a princess in a fairytale. One thing to note though is that you can’t have real rose petals out by the well if they are colored as they will stain the stone, so I had to use dark red silk petals which still looked lovely. It almost rained and they had white umbrellas ready for our guests just in case. But the sun peeked out just as I was about to walk out, it was so funny and perfect timing!!!
After the ceremony, the servers brought appetizers and cocktails to our guests in the upstairs Loggia room during the cocktail hour and served separate appetizers and wine for us downstairs while we had our family photos taken by the Well. It was so elegant! We also took a bunch of photos around the park — completely gorgeous and picture perfect location! So many choices of incredible architecture for backgrounds, all turned out amazing and looked almost as though we had been married in an historic European village. A «Cocktail Hour» was the perfect amount of time for photos giving our guests time to mingle and dine on the beautifully presented and sumptuous tray-​passed hors d’oeuvres and cocktails, then we returned to be announced by our DJ and MC Mick from Elite British DJ, who started first with introducing our attendants, and lastly announcing us and we walked right into our first dance as the music cranked up to play our love song and the lights dimmed. It was so cool!
We had a smaller wedding with about 60 guests so the reception took place in the upper Loggia room which had attached balconies and a gorgeous view of the museums overlooking the front of the Prado building and the courtyard with fountain as well. We took a fun picture at the end of the night peeking through the small front window and waving. Its a beautiful old Spanish architecture that has been meticulously maintained, though the bathrooms unfortunately smell a little bit musty, that was the only thing that bugged me. I had a special room across the hall from our reception for getting ready, storing my purse and make-​up and anything else that myself or my bridesmaids needed. My husband had his room somewhere down the hall. The Loggia room balconies were a beautiful place to wander upon and we had bar tables set up randomly outside with flickering candlelight and fresh petals. We had a sweetheart table facing our guests who surrounded us and the dance floor in a big circle of 6 tables of 10 that were comfortably set. I was a bit worried they would be crowded but they were just fine.
The most impressive part of the whole evening was when the servers came out with the food. There were 5 servers at each table carrying two plates each. They formed a circle behind the guests then at the same time all the plates went down on their left and then on their right. It was perfectly synchronized and many people commented on how nicely done that was so no one had to wait for a plate. The food was perfect. I was savoring every single bite. I didn’t want the night to end. I hardly drank any champagne as I didn’t want my night to be a blur, or not to be able to remember any of the many perfect details. If I were to do it all again, I would have to say I would pick the Prado again! LOL It was that great and hard to outdo for the value and quality and location. I admit at first I was coveting the large Grande Ballroom, but that was way out of our budget. Our small wedding turned out beautifully intimate and if I could go back, I wouldn’t change a thing except for adding fresh flowers and potpourri to the bathrooms, that would have been perfect!

Here for a wedding at the wishing well with the reception upstairs in the Logia room. Great photo ops, and well staffed. The food was served with flair and tastes great! I would definitely recommend this location for an event with friends and family. Looking forward to the rest of the night!

This review is for Mary DiMento, the lady who gave us a tour of the wedding venue and walked us through the packages.
Mary is very pleasant to work with. She got back to me very quickly when I first sent her an inquiry. She was very professional and followed up with us after the tour — definitely someone you can count on to get things done on your wedding day!
Even though we most likely won’t choose this venue (only because the reception is indoors and we really wanted an outdoor reception), we still loved Mary.

Pretty place for wdding, reasonable price.
Good choice for an event.

Ein wirklich wunderschönes Restaurant mit großer Außenterrasse und tollem Interrior.
Sehr schöné Atmosphäre man fühlt sich sofort willkommen und wird von einer Hostess zum Tisch geleitet.
Eine Reservierung ist ratsam. Wir waren spontan dort und es war sehr gut besucht.
Trotzdem haben wir einen guten Tisch auf der Terrasse bekommen und wurden sofort bedient.
Die Speisekarte bietet viele verschiedene Gerichte an und es fällt schwer sich zu entscheiden.
Auf Sonderwünsche wird eingegangen und der Service ist die ganze Zeit über aufmerksam und freundlich.
Von der Vorspeise bis zum Dessert ein echtes Erlebnis.
Wer die Möglichkeit hat hier zu essen, sollte sie nutzen.