Long Island Aquarium

The buffet at a Long Island Aquarium wedding gets set in front of a 120,000-gallon shark habitat. That is the Coliseum Room, and it is a genuinely different cocktail hour. Dinner then moves next door into the Sea Star Ballroom, which is a conventional 5,310-square-foot room with river windows. Two very different feelings on one property, one catering operation, and a starting price they will actually print.

The Coliseum Room is the reason anyone books this

It runs 4,600 square feet and takes 290 for a banquet or reception, 320 theater-style, according to the venue’s own space listing. The 120,000-gallon Lost City of Atlantis Shark Habitat is used as the backdrop for the food display, with coral reef tanks, a giant Pacific octopus and the clownfish exhibit around the rest of the room. It is a proper room with a footprint, not a widened corridor between exhibits, which is what people expect and are wrong about.

The ballroom is an ordinary ballroom, and that is the point

Sea Star is 5,310 square feet, divisible in two, and seats 400 for a banquet, 650 theater, 300 classroom. The windows run floor to ceiling over the Peconic River and the Treasure Cove marina. Ceremonies go either outdoors at the Riverside Pavilion, which is 1,800 square feet, covered, fitted with ceiling fans and good for 100 seated or 250 theater, or indoors in the Grand Foyer.

The reason that matters: the aquarium sells you the novelty and the ballroom sells you the wedding. If you only do the aquarium walk-through on your tour, you have seen the fun half and not the half your guests sit in for four hours. Ask to stand in Sea Star with the lights up.

$10,995 and the two plus signs after it

Their Sweetheart package starts at $10,995.00++ and is described as covering reception, cocktail hour, open bar, photography, DJ and flowers. Very few Suffolk venues print a starting figure at all, so this one is worth having.

Read the plus signs, though. They mean service charge and sales tax, and neither is published anywhere on the site. Suffolk sales tax alone is 8.75%. Treat $10,995 as the floor of the floor, ask for the service charge as a percentage on the first call, and put the real number into the cost calculator rather than the advertised one.

Their own site does not agree with itself on capacity

The weddings page says the venue handles “50 to 340 guests in one of nine diverse locations.” The Sea Star Ballroom page says 400 banquet. The event spaces index announces “eleven distinct banquet room options” and then lists more than fifteen, several of which sit inside the Hyatt Place or the Preston House rather than the aquarium building. None of that is sinister. It is what happens to a website that has been added to for fifteen years. But if your headcount lands between 340 and 400, do not take the number off a marketing page, get the room and the maximum written into the agreement.

Last bit of housekeeping. Atlantis Marine World became the Long Island Aquarium on 1 July 2011, alongside a $24 million expansion and the 100-room Hyatt Place next door, as Riverhead Patch reported. The events arm kept the old name. Your invitations will say aquarium and your contract will say Atlantis. Both are right.