Events at Florentine of Grandville
The event we did yesterday was for a person with leukemia, and we raised a whole bunch of money for that person. Now we aren’t open on Sundays. We still feel the day of rest is important, but every now and then somebody will come to us with a really unique situation.

Now, this particular person, they went around and they tried to find, oh, well, a place would give you this thing, but it’s going to cost you $1,000. It’s going to cost you $2,000. It’s going to cost you $5,000. That’s just to have the building, and so we talked about it, and we’re like that takes away from the whole idea behind why you’re doing a fundraiser, right? I mean, if you’re going to give five grand up front, you know? That’s money that should be going towards the person that has the illness. So we put together this thing. We’ve done it before.

Yesterday we served I don’t even know how many spaghettis. It must have been close to 500, I guess, 500 spaghettis, and it’s our product. We don’t cheapen it because, you know, somebody’s coming in here and not paying full price. This is our product. It’s my sauce, my pasta. I spent six hours extruding the pasta for it and another six hours boiling it because it’s got to be authentic. It’s got to be us. So they came in and they loved it. They thought it was great. They couldn’t believe we would do something like that for the community. They raised a whole bunch of money. We charged them our cost because, I mean, we had to cover our cost obviously. We got to cover the employees, and the food, and the stuff like that, but we didn’t make any money out of it, but it’s not about making money, and that was what was really nice because they appreciated it so much, and we can do that any Sunday or any Saturday afternoon, or Monday nights.

We have done that before, and it works out great, and everybody is happy with that. Yesterday was really nice because it was a spaghetti deal. It was nothing but spaghetti with meat sauce, or with marinara sauce, or with plain, old butter, and then we did the salad bar for everybody and bread, and that’s the way it has to be pretty much for that many people because you’re talking 600 people.

That’s a lot of people. Now if you have like 50, or 60, or 80 people, we’ve done choices of three, choices of four. You can do pizzas. Anything under 30 we can go right off the menu. So we have different options for all different sizes of groups, but it kind of depends on your size of the group because if you get too many people, you really have to limit things because otherwise the kitchen just can’t handle it. It’s almost private.

There’s a couple of like little whiles that are on either side, so the servers come in through one way, and they come back the other way, and it’s—you’re all by, you’re all together in a small space.

It’s almost like your wedding party. You know, I mean, only it’s a bit more of a you, and we do rehearsal dinners here every week, every week, Thursday and Friday nights for sure and sometimes even on Saturday nights we’ll get a rehearsal dinner, earlier in the week as well, and it’s usually between 15 and 30 people. So people can go off the menu, or they can get a choice of three, or if they want to keep things cheap, which everybody knows, you know, with the economy the way it is you try to save some money, so you can feed, you know, four large adults, you know, with a large pizza here.

Check out the Florentine of Grandville menu!