Anniversary flowers in Bloomfield

A striking number of Bloomfield anniversaries are anniversaries of weddings that happened within four miles of the house. This is banquet-hall country: Nanina's in the Park sits on Mill Street in Belleville inside Branch Brook Park, the Essex County park that holds the largest collection of cherry blossom trees in the United States; The Manor, Highlawn Pavilion up on Eagle Rock Reservation with the Manhattan skyline behind it, Mayfair Farms and Pleasantdale Château are all within a short drive in West Orange; The Brownstone is up in Paterson. Closer still, the Oakeside Bloomfield Cultural Center occupies a historic estate at 240 Belleville Avenue in this township and hosts weddings of its own. Which means the anniversary order into Bloomfield is very often a couple who married locally, stayed locally, and are marking year twelve or year forty in a house a few minutes from where the reception was. That changes the brief. The arrangement is usually going to a dining table or a hall console rather than to a hotel suite, and the couple has almost certainly seen good flowers before — they had a florist at the wedding.

The second thing worth knowing is that dinner is almost never in Bloomfield itself. This township has good neighborhood places and a real downtown around the Green, but the anniversary dinner reservation in this market is one of three drives. West on Bloomfield Avenue into Montclair, where the restaurant row runs along Bloomfield Avenue and Church Street and where The MC Hotel sits on Bloomfield Avenue as the only proper boutique hotel in the immediate area. South into Newark's Ironbound, where Ferry Street's Portuguese and Spanish restaurants — Fornos of Spain, Iberia and the rest of that stretch — have been doing North Jersey anniversary dinners for half a century, and where the Robert Treat Hotel at 50 Park Place, the Hilton Newark Penn Station and NJPAC sit ten minutes away. Or east across the Hackensack to the Hoboken and Jersey City waterfronts, where the reservation comes with a Manhattan skyline. The practical consequence: do not send anniversary flowers to a restaurant. Most places in these towns have nowhere to put them, no staff member free at seven o'clock, and no interest in owning the risk. Send to the house in the afternoon so the arrangement is on the table when the couple comes home.