Leonard's Palazzo

Leonard’s publishes square footage for its ballrooms, which nearly no Long Island catering hall does, and once you have square footage you can do arithmetic the salesperson would rather you skipped. Sixty-odd years at 555 Northern Boulevard in Great Neck, eight named rooms, and a Grand Ballroom that seats up to 850. Start with the numbers and the tour makes more sense.

The rooms, with dimensions

All of this comes off Leonard’s own venue pages. The Grand Ballroom: “Seating from 300-850 Guests,” 7,640 sq ft, 112 feet 10 inches by 78 feet — note those dimensions multiply out to about 8,800, so ask on the tour which of the two is the usable floor. The Tiffany & Crystal Room: “Seats from 150 up to 250 Guests,” 4,790 sq ft. The Continental: 150 for a seated dinner or 135 buffet-style, 2,950 sq ft. The Empire Room: 100 seated, 70 buffet, 2,240 sq ft.

The Leonardo da Vinci Veranda is listed at up to 280 guests across roughly 6,000 square feet plus more than 2,000 square feet of indoor-outdoor space, and it is sold as a room where ceremony, cocktail hour and reception all happen without moving. The Provincial Room is described as a cocktail room with direct access to the west patio. The Collonade Room is described as flexible, and the Holiday & Parisian Room rounds out the eight. None of the three publishes a capacity, so none belongs in your comparison until you have asked.

Do the division

7,640 square feet divided by 850 guests is about nine square feet a head. At the bottom of the same published range, 300 guests, it is roughly 25. That is an enormous swing inside one room, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. For a benchmark: Westbury Manor’s Manor Room works out to about 14 square feet a head at its published maximum, which we walked through on the Jericho Turnpike page.

Nine square feet a person is a real, legal, functioning room — it is also a room with a full dance floor and 850 chairs in it. So go see it set for a number close to yours. Ask what the Grand Ballroom looks like at 800 and then ask what it looks like at 400, and watch which answer they are more comfortable giving.

What Leonard’s won’t say, and what a directory claims

Leonard’s own site publishes no prices, no minimums and no fees. Its headline capacity line is “from intimate gatherings of 50 to spectacular celebrations of 1,000+ guests.”

LongIslandCateringHalls.com, which is a directory and not the venue, lists a range of $70 to $175 per plate, claims the building can hold up to 3,000 guests, and says it runs three events concurrently. We are naming the source because we cannot verify a word of it, and the 3,000 figure sits badly against the venue’s own “1,000+.” Use the per-plate range as a rough shape and check it against our pricing research, not as a quotable number.

Eight ballrooms in one building

Which makes the honest tour question something other than how many rooms there are. Ask how many weddings are booked on your date, then ask which entrance, which lobby and which bathroom block are yours for the night. Get that in writing before the deposit clears, because it is the answer that determines whether the evening feels like a wedding or like a shift. If a shared building is a dealbreaker, our smaller-venue list is the better place to start.