So decide between the two deliveries before you decide anything else, because they fail in different ways. Flowers at the table are the cinematic version and the harder one: a restaurant needs to have agreed to hold an arrangement, somebody has to remember which reservation it belongs to, and it has to arrive in the window between the kitchen's afternoon prep and the first seating rather than in the middle of either. Call the restaurant first, get a name, and tell us that name — a delivery addressed to a business with no contact behind it is the one that ends up beside a host stand. Flowers at the house that morning are the version that actually works, and in a commuter township they work better than average: a vase on the kitchen table before anybody has left for the Sloan Avenue platform is seen for the whole day rather than for ninety minutes. It also solves the problem of who carries the flowers home from dinner, which nobody thinks about until they are standing in a parking lot on Quakerbridge Road with a wrapped bouquet and a doggy bag. Our honest recommendation for a weeknight anniversary in Hamilton is the morning delivery, and for a Saturday, the table.
Hotels are the third address, and they come up more here than the township's own size suggests, because a milestone anniversary means family arriving from out of state and a park-and-ride at Hamilton station on Sloan Avenue that makes this an easy place to be based. The rooms people actually book are north and west: the Nassau Inn on Palmer Square in Princeton, which is the walk-to-dinner option; the Peacock Inn on Bayard Lane, which is the small, quiet one; the Hyatt Regency Princeton on Carnegie Center and the Westin Princeton at Forrestal Village on Village Blvd, both of them Route 1 business hotels that convert neatly into family weekend hotels; and the Marriott on College Road East beside them. A hotel delivery has a rule of its own: it is a front-desk delivery, not a room delivery. The desk takes it, logs it and holds it, and unless the guest has checked in the piece sits behind the counter — so a bouquet meant to be waiting in the room needs the desk to have been asked, in advance, by the guest or by you. Give us the guest's full name as the reservation is made, the check-in date, and a mobile number. Out-of-state senders forget the last one and it is the one that rescues the delivery.