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2 u February 2024

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Bridal Magazine

How do you want to remember your wedding day??

Y

ou are making big decisions and plans about how to make your wedding day perfect. From the venue to the colors, to the dress, guest list, decorations, music, etc.

When the day finally arrives, it will be full of celebration worthy moments that you will want to remember forever.

NOT HAVING A WEDDING VIDEO IS THE #1 REGRET OF COUPLES AFTER THEIR WEDDING DAY IS OVER. My job is to capture every celebration worthy moment that your wedding day will produce, from getting ready to a first look, the ceremony, of course, and the party afterwards, and that is exactly what I do.

THINK ABOUT THIS . . .

What would it mean if to you if your Grandparents had a video of their wedding day?

What would it mean to have a video you could watch, and actually hear their voices and see what they looked like and sounded like 50 years ago. Having the ability to hear their voices crack when they were overcome with emotion during their vows as they were beginning their lives together generations before.

THAT’S WHAT YOUR WEDDING FILM CAN BE FOR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY That’s the power of having a wedding video! This isn’t just a pretty music video, this is a wedding film that tells your story for generations to come and far beyond. Your unique love story will live on forever.

3325 Robbins Rd. Springfield, IL 62704 217-793-3300 gigantijewelry.com

I have met so many amazing families and couples since I began this journey, and it means the world to me when a family member reaches out and tells me how much the wedding film meant to them. I want my wedding films to become a legacy for families, a beautiful way to be transported back in time to re- live their wedding day. My ultimate goal is to make a positive impact on the families I meet along the way, and if I can do that, then I’ve done my job.

Steve Weber Films is the premiere wedding videographer in the Central Illinois area. Established in 2018, I have had the honor of capturing over 150 love stories all over the country, and amassing over 600,000 views on YouTube, this job is my passion!

You can find out more about who I am and what I do by visiting my website www.steveweberfilms.com. There you can find some of my favorite weddings I’ve captured. I look forward to working with you to create a wedding film you can be proud of. Contact me today.

Article & Photos Submitted By: Steve Weber Films

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6 u February 2024

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Cured, Finding the Theatre in Catering

By Lynn Colburn

W

hen people attend the theatre, they expect to be entertained with the full spectrum of their senses. That is exactly what Cured Catering owners Brian and Melissa Reilly set out to do with their catering business. The couple, now based in MacMurray College’s old McClelland Dining Hall and Annie Merner Chapel, started their business with the philosophy to create something completely different!

Brian, 45, and Melissa, 43, believe that the food should not only taste wonderful, which it does, but when someone walks in, the whole catering project should have a Cured Catering feel. He wants to influence the complete list of senses.

Brian’s background is in the hospitality industry. “I have 30 years in the business with experience in hotels, hospitality, restaurants, bars, country clubs and booking bands,” he explains. With such a varied experience he thinks about sound, lighting, staging, food, and all aspects of the catering business with a new perspective.

“I went to MacMurray College in the mid-90s,” says Brian, graduating in 1999. He still serves on the MacMurray Alumni board that plans all the alumni activities that such as a homecoming which is planned for the weekend of June 23 this year. “I think they said there were over 1,000 people attending,” notes Brian.

Although Melissa did not attend MacMurray, she looks forward to alumni events also. “His friends and MacMurray family became mine,” says Melissa, “so I fell in love with them and they all came to our wedding. This place is just full of the wonderful memories associated with that time of our courtship and it feels really good to be here.”

Family is a big part of Melissa and Brian’s life and business. They have seven children, Camille, 16; Jack, 16; Tristan, 13; Grayson, 11; the twins, Josephine and Jocelyn, 10, and Harrison, 4. “We are really building it for them and can’t wait to see them grow with the family business,” says Melissa right on the Cured Catering website.

“We couldn’t do this without our friends and family.”

We thought, let’s just make some meals for people that have been in the food industry who basically live paycheck-to-paycheck and right now aren’t getting a paycheck. Our product would have gone bad anyway. At first, we thought we’ll just do this for a couple of weeks and burn through product that we’ve already have.”

“Other restaurants started bringing us product and then somebody started a GoFundMe account that people were paying for us to keep it up,” Brian reveals. “So, we kept it up and served 10,000 meals over the first 10 weeks of Covid. That was quite a learning experience! Before then we were pretty small, but that taught us how to make 500 meals a night very quickly. It helped us learned that and it was cool too.”

“In the middle of that,” explains Brian, “we moved from Springfield out to Riverton and worked out of what was the Eagle’s Club for two and a half years. We outgrew that space and moved back to a location in Springfield and were planning to buy the property, but that deal didn’t work out. We were there for about nine months.

When we were looking for a location, everything in Springfield was really a restaurant space and not a catering space,” Brian says. “We had done some work for Mike Hayes while he was running the space and it brought us to Jacksonville.”

Named Illinois Times’ Best Caterers for two years in a row, they are excited about the cuisine they serve. “We do southern coastal, southern comfort, some that go into a Mexican influence, but we are fully customizable,” Melissa describes their menu. “We excel in creating custom menus for custom events which is awesome for everything from weddings to galas.”

“It is so much fun,” Melissa continues. “We love to research the cultural aspects of food and then we get to experience and try all these different native dishes (“like South African,” inserts Brian)! It teaches us to think outside the box.”

The couple has come a long way in the last few years, starting off 2017 working out of a pizza food truck for a friend. They began building a catering business in 2017 which was slowly just picking up steam.

“But then again,” Melissa remembers family again and says fondly, “we have Schaum Tortes on the menu (a German meringue dessert) which is something his Grandma Betty used to make for Brian and his brother when they were growing up. I became obsessed with making them the way Grandma Betty made them. Even now it makes me happy.”

Of course, when Covid happened everything shut down. “We started a non-for-profit to feed people in the service industry that were displaced from work,” says Brian. “We had a bunch of extra product.

Brian carries on saying, “We are really presentation forward. We set

“We really look at it as comfort foods served in an elegant way,” explains Brian. “It is all familiar stuff we just put our own spin on it.”

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every event as a stage. We take a lot of the theatrics from running bands and things like that. We have lighting and treat our buffets as a stage. So when you walk into a room you know Cured is there.

And our clients have come to expect it. It is our thing!”

Cured is booking now all the way into 2024 on this campus. Brian says, “Wedding season is especially busy from May until the end of October. I look forward this year to having weddings every weekend if we are available. We have the Chapel that will seats 800+ and the dining hall seats 350.”

The Reillys are talking about leasing Katie Hall or one of the buildings across the way as a kind of an Air B&B where weddings would to be able to stay right on campus.

Brian says, “There are a lot of alumni and local folks that love the chapel. “We also see the trend around the Petersburg area with venues springing up because people from up state are looking for somewhere quaint that they can have a hometown-feel wedding and I think we definitely fit in that realm.”

“We remain involved in events with Jacksonville organizations and corporations,” says Brian. “We are doing the Kiwanis Pancake and Sausage here (which took place in March), the Beaux Arts Ball, several events for Routt, and we hosted the wedding show and the job fair for the radio station here. We are happy to be keeping all the local community ties.”

Cured Cather does as much local sourcing as possible. “We work though MJ Kellner out of Springfield,” explains Brian. “They are an employee-owned business and they do a lot of their sourcing locally. Most of our meats come from Kerr Meats which is down

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in St. Louis. We use Jones Locker for all of our cured meats and in Sangamon County, and I think in Morgan County, we were the first to be approved to do our own meat curing. So we have salamis and cured meats that we do from scratch. They come in the door at Jones’, we process them, we hang them and our cured meats are done in house. It is neat to have gotten to that place. When I started the company that was an ultimate goal and we are very quickly getting to the point where we will be able to do mostly all of our own meats.”

Melissa says they are also planning a venue in the Buffalo area where they will have property to do gardens. “We,” says Melissa, “are excited about the garden space so we can use our vegetables or fruits for Cured as well. I don’t think we will have enough room to grow as much as we will need, but we can use it for pickling.”

Brain says, “Our family lives Mechanicsburg and our kids go to Tri City in Buffalo. We purchased a 1906 chapel and are naming it Bullard County Chapel after the architect. We are going to build another site in Buffalo that the kids can walk to after school. Eventually we will have a base here and a base in Buffalo giving us the operational ability to span the whole of the central Illinois area.”

Cured Catering aims to help you use all your senses to enjoy any event that they produce. They tweak and transform each dish for the menu you choose until it’s a perfect blend of downhome familiarity and undiscovered flavor combinations. Reach Cured Caterers at curedcaters@gmail.com, (217) 391-2380, on Facebook, Instragram or their website, www.curedcaters.com.

Article & Photos Submitted By: Cured Catering

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