When thinking about their wedding, Victoria Bata and Alec Meacham quickly realized that it could be anything they wanted it to be. “Suddenly, we thought, ‘Oh, we could just have our wedding be exactly like a regular night that we love.’ Or, specifically, like our two favorite nights of the year, which are Passover and Thanksgiving,” says Victoria, a TV writer and director.
“We also were inspired by the Friday night of a wedding weekend. Everything’s fresh and everyone’s just seeing each other for the first time, and you just drink and eat and it’s easy,” she says. She wanted the wedding to be just like that. “And then being like, ‘Hey, but then you guys all get to leave the next day,’ and that’s it. (You also only need one outfit.)
Brevity was also a logistical necessity. At the time, Victoria was working on the Atlanta set of the Hulu show Tell Me Lies. “You can’t really miss days on set,” she explains. “In the schedule, when we got married...it all changed because of the strikes.” She ended up working in Atlanta until late Thursday night before heading to the airport. She arrived back in Los Angeles late and had a quiet Friday with Alec, who is a producer with De Line Pictures. “We were very strict with everyone that we were not going to hang out with them aside from at the wedding,” she says. “On Friday, Alec and I went to dinner at Chi Spacca by ourselves. It was amazing.”
Victoria and Alec, who met as students at Johns Hopkins, were together for 13 years before marrying. “There was another thing that probably kept us from getting married for a long time,” she confesses. “Alec’s dad died when he was 16 and my mom died when I was 13. I think we always knew that the night that we were getting married was going to have an air of bittersweetness to it, because there were going to be two very large figures who weren’t there.” Simple gestures helped them feel like they were honoring their parents and keeping them present.
The relaxed, phone-free night was just what the couple had pictured. “It was exactly what we wanted, with people who we’re close with and who we loved so much. It wasn’t even a normal wedding. There wasn’t a procession or anything. We drank during the ceremony. But even with all of that, it was totally overwhelming,” Victoria says. And at 1 A.M., they quietly slipped away and walked home in the rain, as the guests kept the party going. Read on for how it all went down.
The Location
Finding a restaurant that could seat up to 120 people and had a full bar (Victoria and Alec love martinis) was more difficult than initially anticipated. Suffice to say, the couple was thrilled when they ultimately decided on Gwen, chef Curtis Stone’s Michelin-starred restaurant and butcher shop. “We went to dinner there with our friends one night to try it out, and we were like, ‘This is amazing.’”
Though they had never eaten there before, Alec has fond associations with the restaurant. “During the pandemic, when we were all locked down in quarantine, some of the local restaurants around us in our West Hollywood area became places that we would go to for groceries and supplies,” he says. “Gwen was one of those places where we would go on a weekly basis, with our masks and everything. They were a lifeline for us, in a funny way, so I think we had a softness for that place.”
Gwen had never hosted a wedding before, which surprised Victoria and Alec. “We walked in and said, ‘We want to get married here. Don’t panic. We’ll make it really easy; we promise. It’s just going to be people standing. We’ll just stand here and get married, and then everyone can keep drinking, and it’ll just be a regular night for you guys,’” Victoria recalls saying. “That was and was not the truth, in the end.”
The Stationery
Victoria’s best friend Margaret Marsh runs a stationery company called Strawberry Paper. “The save the dates were the first step in planning what the whole night was,” Victoria says. “They featured a messy table with glasses of wine and empty plates—a table that you’ve been sitting at for six hours, having your glass refilled. We were always matching that stationery with our vision of what the night would be.”
The save the date also quietly honored Victoria’s mother, Linden, with a drawing of a linden blossom, and Alec’s father, who grew up on an apple farm, with a drawing of an apple.
The Menu
While Gwen in known for its meat, Alec and Victoria are vegetarians, and the wedding was meat-free. (The irony was funny to them.) There was a five-course meal focused on produce with individual wine pairings. “They went above and beyond in terms of doing things that we loved, including an amazing cheese course instead of a traditional dessert,” Alec says.
The Flowers
The couple didn’t expect flowers to play a big part in the wedding. “We wanted the whole aesthetic to be as simple as possible and not fussy in any way,” Alec says.
But flowers ended up coming into play as a practical consideration that turned out beautifully. To conceal the restaurant’s oven, their wedding planner Katie Donahoe of KCD event co. put them in touch with florists who could, as Victoria says, “make this oven not an oven.” Megan Gray, who owns the floral design studio Honey & Poppies, sent a sketch that nearly made Victoria cry. “This little sketch had very wild installations of wildflowers. I thought, oh, you took the best version of what could have existed in our mind and then showed it to us. It was completely stunning what she did.”
The No-Phone Rule
Donahoe played a critical role in the event. “Once we hired Katie, we realized we never, ever would’ve been able to do it without her. She pulled in every single vendor, just made it so seamless and easy for us,” Victoria says. A genius idea was her suggestion of using an antique card catalog to store guests’ phones during the wedding.
The Dress
“After we got engaged, I saw this Vivienne Westwood dress and I was like, ‘Oh, I already know: that’s my dress,’ Victoria says. “I went and tried it on with my three best friends and they confirmed it.”
It would have been a remarkably straightforward process if Victoria hadn’t had a late-breaking revelation. “I bought it, did the fittings, everything, and then I threw everybody into a tailspin because I decided that I wanted to add sleeves to it,” she recalls. “I went to see Adele in Vegas, and she wears this Vivienne Westwood dress in one of her videos—this amazing cherry-red dress and it has three-quarter length tulle sleeves. I grabbed my friend’s arm and was like, ‘Oh my God, I have to add sleeves to my dress.’”
The Ceremony
Victoria’s brother Aaron officiated what Alec called a “short but sweet” evening ceremony. “That was what we wanted our ceremony to be: just very simple and straightforward, and mostly an opportunity for us to do our vows and have everyone hear them,” Alec says.
“Our vows were my favorite part. They just came together perfectly. We were both really nervous and then it turned out there was no reason to be nervous. It was just really an amazing feeling to get to say all these things in front of everyone that we love,” says Victoria.
The Reception
The rest of the evening was a “really just a whirlwind of cocktails and wine and incredible food,” Alec recalls. “We sat down for our incredible long, elaborate dinner, which was just exactly what we wanted. It was the same feeling of sitting down for our Passover seder or Thanksgiving dinner where there’s a lot of courses, a lot of food, a lot of talking, and a lot of wine. That was exactly the way we wanted it. It worked out beautifully, and then continued with a lot more drinks and lovely cakes from our pastry chef, Sasha Piligian. Eventually, we transitioned into hanging out in the very cool speakeasy area upstairs at Gwen, where we had more cocktails before eventually calling it a night.”
One moment stands out in Alec’s mind: “In the middle of dinner, I think we were both feeling a little caught up in the energy and emotion of everything. So we decided to go take a little walk outside, and it was a rare rainy night in L.A. Really, it was just a lovely little moment to ourselves, and I think solidified what we had always been wanting to do with this wedding, which was something that was festive for everyone and celebratory, but also something that was going to make us first and foremost happy and satisfied.”
Victoria Bata and Alec Meacham’s Wedding
Adrienne Gaffney is a features editor at ELLE and previously worked at WSJ Magazine and Vanity Fair.
