Brink Lounge closing leaves Madison brides scrambling | Entertainment

Before she got engaged, Jaime Rowe knew she wanted to get married at the Brink Lounge.

When Rowe, a corporate trainer at Madison Technology Consulting, first saw the 12,000-foot space on East Washington Avenue, she envisioned holding her wedding there.

“I saw the beautiful staircase and everything, and a long time ago, in the back of my head, I was like ‘This is where I’m going to get married,'” Lo said. “So when I got engaged last July, that was the first place we visited. It ended up being the only place we visited.”

Rowe and her fiancé, Jesse Newell, booked the Sept. 30 Brink Lounge more than a year in advance. But she “shocked her system” last Wednesday when she got a call from the venue’s general manager saying the Brink Lounge would close at the end of the month.

“I started sobbing,” Lo said. “I try to be as sweet as I can because I know the poor guy is not only going to call all these brides who are in a panic right now, but he’s going to lose his job. But I’m having a complete panic attack. You have this dream, You have to grieve for it and say goodbye to it.”

When it opened in 2004 on the site of a former Buy N Sell store, the building at 750 E. Washington Ave., featuring the Brink Lounge, High Noon Saloon and Brass Ring, was the beachhead for a wave of development that has transformed the Eastern Washington corridor . The Brink Lounge is home to a variety of events, including jazz concerts, live comedy, brunches, book launches, election night parties, Oscars aftermath and, of course, weddings.

But emerging from the pandemic, staffing issues have left Brink Lounge in an unsustainable position, developer Curt Brink said. Both his General Manager and Reservations Manager had left for other places and he did not have the qualified staff to fill those roles and provide clients with quality events.

“It’s hard,” Brink said. “I’m not just a bar with bartenders. The quality of your staff and management is the quality of how it works, you have to get people ready for a period of time. Your good people are gone.”

Brink added that both High Noon and Brass Ring were doing well, and while the Brink Lounge space would be restructured, nothing would happen to the building itself. “Now is the logical time to do that and completely reset,” he said of the Brink space.

Management began notifying customers about the closure last week, and Brinker said refund checks will be mailed out this week. Where possible, management wants to help clients find alternative locations for their events, especially weddings, he said.

Luo said she didn’t get that kind of help when she got the message. She’d done all her other wedding planning and was apprehensive about the prospect of trying to find another location, especially since many of her guests were already planning to travel from across the country.

But when she posted about her plight on social media last week, she received an outpouring of support from the Madison community. Venues, including some she hadn’t even considered, like the Madison Children’s Museum and the Wisconsin Masonic Temple, reached out to see if they could help.

“Madison made the move for me,” Lo said. “All these different people were offering advice and the venues were quick to respond. Everyone was very compassionate and it felt like every event venue I spoke to wanted to help, even if they couldn’t. It Made me understand that’s why I live here. All these strangers trying to figure things out for me. It’s been awesome.”

Rowe took a virtual tour of the Monona Terrace convention center on Friday and officially booked her wedding there on Monday morning — Sept. 30, her original date.

She urged brides in the same predicament to seek help from their networks.

“It’s always sad when a business goes out of business,” Rowe said. “I was always going to fringe stuff, I went to maker’s markets and music shows and stuff. But the whole community was like, ‘Let’s help people do this.

“The best thing about Madison is we really are a community and people are there to help.”