Double happiness: saying 'I do' to unconventional wedding venues and menus
No fancy dining hall. No sumptuous banquet. No pretentious tower of champagne flutes and, of course, no traditional format. When Huang Liwen married her fiancé, they tied the knot in a movie theater and held the reception in a hotpot restaurant.
Many Z-generation couples in China are saying no to traditional weddings and choosing to get married in unconventional settings.
Huang, who hails from the Anhui Province capital of Hefei, shared her wedding on the lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu (Red), telling viewers she wanted something "different" right from the start.
"Holding a common wedding is tiresome and expensive," she said. "I was wary about weddings since I became engaged."
Her plan was easy to execute. Most movie theaters rent their halls out for special occasions; she needed only to bring her own decorations. For the reception at an outlet of HaiDiLao Hotpot franchise, she simply booked tables.
Bride Huang Liwen from Anhui Province shared an online picture of staff wearing pins with the traditional "double happiness" marriage greeting at the hotpot restaurant where the wedding "banquet" was held.
Huang and her fiancé decided not to invite senior relatives to the wedding. Most of the attendees were their peers, so no one raised eyebrows about the venues or the absence of traditional customs.
A conventional wedding in China usually spans a whole day. In the morning, the groom goes to the bride's home to pick her up and convey her to his home to meet his parents. And then the couple go to the wedding venue – usually a big hotel or a fancy restaurant in cities and perhaps just the groom's home in villages. Although couples register their marriage in civil offices, often long before the official wedding day, a nuptials ceremony is held on the day before the reception banquet.
Custom then requires the couple to perform such essentials as serving tea to their parents, playing games with bridesmaids and groomsmen, and visiting every table to propose toasts during the banquet.
This prescribed script is certainly a bottomless pit for money. According to a report by the China Wedding Expo, the largest wedding bazaar in the country, a wedding in 2023 – including banquet, wedding planning, decorations, vehicles, dresses and other expenses – cost between 200,000 yuan (US$28,000) and 300,000 yuan in large metropolises, and 120,000 yuan to 170,000 yuan in smaller cities.
By comparison, Huang's wedding was frugal.
"The movie theater hall, which we booked for seven hours, cost 5,000 yuan, and about 50 guests dined at the hotpot restaurant for around 7,500," she said. "That was a perfect deal for me."
If hotpot restaurants rate as a wedding "banquet" site, then what about burger joints?
Wedding planner Li Simeng organized nuptials at a McDonald's franchise in the Hubei Province capital of Wuhan.
"It was a wedding for a friend of mine," she said. "We booked the whole outlet for the event and decorated it to complement McDonald's style."
Getting married in a McDonald's outlet is not so unusual anymore.
The wedding was quite casual. The bride wore a white mini dress, and the groom appeared without jacket. Guests ate burgers and French fries, and took photos. That was it.
The latest trend isn't all that groundbreaking. When Western-style fast-food chains first entered China nearly four decades ago, there was a time young people held weddings in the outlets.
The first KFC restaurant in Shanghai, which opened in the Shanghai Club on the Bund, hosted several mass wedding events in the 1980s, amid government calls to scale back extravagant wedding traditions to reduce waste.
Nowadays, young people no longer need government to tell them to trim wedding budgets.
"Young people don't have that much money in their 20s and 30s, so it's their parents who shoulder most of the expense," said Li. "With a simpler wedding, a couple can spend what money they have on something closer to their hearts, such as travel or home renovation."
Fast-food restaurants and bubble tea shops have been quick to seize the opportunities of the new trend with "wedding set" promotions.
In Hong Kong, a McDonald's franchise offers a HK$2,999 (US$386) package that provides use of the entire restaurant for two hours and up to 20 guests. It also provides wedding decor and gifts to the new couple.
Bubble tea brand HEYTEA offers wedding discounts of up to 10 percent for newlyweds who order 99 or more cups of tea products
Jiang Qi, a bride from the city of Huzhou in Zhejiang Province, ordered more than 100 cups of milk tea for wedding guests to replace the traditional marriage liquors.
"It cost us only 1,700 yuan, far less than the cost of liquor at more than 500 yuan a bottle," she said. "And tea is better than liquor in every sense. At first, my parents thought it would be too informal for such an occasion, but the guests were actually quite happy."
Li said that "unconventional" weddings show the individualistic spirit of young people.
"Traditionally, weddings have been not so much for the couple but for their families, especially older, custom-bound relatives," she said. "A couple's parents usually had a lot of say-so on where a wedding should be held, how many guests were invited, what food to serve and what rites would be observed so as not to lose face among friends and relatives. But nowadays, younger parents are more open-minded and willing to give their children more voice on how they want to marry."
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