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So I am going to give a shout out to our caterer that we hired last week. Michael C Events is new to the business of catering at only a couple years young, but I can tell by their business savvy and creativity with food that they will have no problem building their client list. There are two high school friends from San Diego. One was in the medical field and the other a chef. Both saw the opportunity to start a new venture and were brave enough to take it. Now I am on this 20K budget so unless I got the typical boring ass wedding food, there was no way I could do a sit down dinner which is what we really wanted. We also wanted food that not only tasted well but presented well. So we got quotes from 6K for boring food to 18K for nice looking food. Now, we had a few in mind, Passion Fruit Catering, Primal Alchemy, and Michael C. They all presented us with menus that were creative and sounded delicious. So what do you do with 3 caterers? You pit them together to a battle to the death! Ok not really, you essentially negotiate and pit them together in an auctioning format. Well Michael C blew us away with his ability to compromise with us to drop our costs substantially from where we started. This only made the tasting more pressure packed b/c we needed it to be good. And it was. It was really good actually and compared to a couple weddings that we been to, crazy good. One of the crazy things about Michael C is the lack of service fees. Now this already puts him lightyears ahead of the other guys charging anywhere from 8-18% in service charges and still expecting gratuities. Props! When you first talk to Michael you will notice a couple of things - he stays up crazy late (I think he sent us a proposal at like 2am) and he is willing to work with you. Another thing that I liked is that he sent a hard copy of the proposal with his brochure and stuff. Very professional.
So this is my little shoutout to our caterer and even though we haven't gone through our event, I can highly recommend him just based on our experience with him. Check him out!
Michael C. Events
Michael Compean
(877) 625-6453
www.michaelcevents.com
So I flew into LA on Friday to meet with a caterer for a tasting. We were having the tasting at his business partner's house. If you have ever seen homes in San Mateo, CA, then you will understand this neighborhood. Not so nice outside, but all done up inside. It is like hidden gems. So we went through the whole tasting and the my biggest fear was that his food would suck. We have had the menu for a while and even though he changed it alittle, it was still A+. I know that he is just cooking for 2 people and the food is probably alittle more moist than it would be at a 160 person wedding, but I think it will be pretty damn good when W day comes.
So strike that off the list and I will blog about him later so other people can get into the mix. All I got to say is good food and great price.
Custom Caters and Catered Affairs
These two vendors gave us pretty reasonable bids on catering our wedding. Custom Caterers was actually lower than Catered Affairs although they used Catered Affairs' chef to cook all the food. So the deal is that Catered Affairs is a husband & wife team who main point of sale is Alycia Yescas. If you Google her, she comes up as a thief in one listing, pretty funny and that should have also given us a clue. Custom Caterers is some kind of splinter cell run by Nicole. So not only do they charge for tastings, I think $15 per person, the food sucks.
You meet them at Alycia's restaurant (don't know how that thing stays open) and she starts pitching you the concept and the idea, etc... Then the food starts rolling out, this is where the gets bad, more specifically, the food gets bad. My fiancee said that she had force the food down her throat and the bullshit into her ears. She should have asked for a refund. Actually she said that Alycia should have paid her for enduring the torture of the food. Can you imagine, you are eating this nasty nasty food and all the while Alycia is trying to sell it to you. Maybe Alycia should taste her food before she serves it. If it was a bad day, then it was a nuclear disaster. Hiroshima all over again. Stay away!
Sorry Nicole, your shop goes down with the big boat by virtue of association.
I must admit, I am learning as we go. I have no clue how much I can negotiate with caterers. I basically took their price and then filtered from that point on. If they were too much, then I moved to the next person. Well in comes a caterer that we put a deposit down to save the date. He gave us a fairly large bid and I basically discarded him, but he was persistent and agressive. So we switched from full sit down to a buffet in order for him to come more in line. Well the future Mrs went to an event for which he was catering for and he asked "What will it take for you to hire us?", so the Mrs' responded "I really want sit down and another hors d'oeuvre." And I put the rest down:
Caterer "How about if drop 1k off?"
Mrs "No"
Caterer "2K"
Mrs "No"
Caterer "3k"
Mrs "No"
Caterer "Ok, how about XXXX out the door"
Mrs "Ok"
Caterer "Ok I will draw it up"
So essentially the guy went down double digit percentage points in a matter of minutes. The question how much are these people really making.
So now I got one bid in that isn't your normal wedding food, but a little something more, but I haven't even tasted his food. So to not put all my eggs in one basket, I started emailing more caterers. They send me menus, prices, etc... and I just give them a quick glance, but don't really care about formulating a menu. Then I reply, I want this that this and that and want it for this price (of course less than the other guy) and wait for a response. They either say this is the best we can offer or actually beat it. Man now that I have a baseline, I can skip all the BS and get to the beef.
I do not think you should pay for tastings. I think it is their right as a vendor who is trying to get you to be their customer to try to impress you as much as they want and treat it as a selling expense. You may spend anywhere from 30%-50% of your budget on them, so why can't they eat $40 or $50 when they stand to make anywhere from 6-20K for one night work. They try to get you in two ways:
1. Outright tell you that the tasting cost money.
2. The tasting cost money but if you choose them they will deduct it from the total.
Both of these situations are uncalled for. They both tell me that they have so much business that to entertain us is more of a hassle than an honor. Now this may be the consumer side of me talking, but it is the consumer who chooses who caters the wedding.
Remember, you are in control, you make the rules. If they don't like it, then they shouldn't have your business.
Should I call out a vendor who I don't think is quite up to snuff?
Definitely.
The way I see it is that a lot people are trying to make this the best day of their life. They are investing their time and energy to check out these vendors and meet with them, correspond with them, and listen to them sell. When vendors do something that is not well, then of course you don't go with them. But if they do something that is memorably not well, then i think you should spread the word so other people don't waste their time.
In due time I will be calling them out.
Caterers beware.
When does a potential caterer become a "Get me the hell out of here!" type of caterer? I guess it happens when they suck major. My fiancee went to a potential caterer's restaurant for a tasting of what she would potentially serve at our wedding. Now this tasting was for 2 people, $30, out somewhere where it is actually semi far which equals gas which equals more money.
So I come back from my dinner (Congrats Mike & Vicki) and bounce online and she proceeded to tell me that she ate "Poop" aka nothing special or so I thought. At first I was like "Ok, I can't remember if she was suppose to do something tonite, but maybe she went to some grassy knoll looking for some protein and found poop." Then I totally remembered, she had a tasting. So I proceeded to tell me how it was. "I should get my money back", "I actually got tired of eating it.", "I just wanted to leave." , "All I could think was 'Thief & Liar'".
So all and all it was a pretty bad liar. And the funny part is, is that the lady is pitching my fiancee about the food and how she caters parties in Beverly Hills and Malibu while my fiancee is trying to shove the food down her mouth without trying to gag cuz she was dying of starvation. I think if she was stuck on a deserted island with her food, she would eat the sand.
Moral of the story is...Stay away from .... email me if u want to know.
You ever wonder if caterers actually listen to you? I have been trying to get some quotes from some caterers to see if bringing in an outside caterer would be cost effective versus going with some type of wedding package. So I put our event out there to see if I can get some hits and I did.
Well one caterer I talked to for about 15 minutes on the phone about the event and what we wanted to offer, etc... One of the questions he asked was, "What is your budget?" I replied, " I would like the food, service, rentals, and taxes to be 9K max." Albeit to my surprise I get a proposal from the caterer the next morning at $20,000.
WTF?!?!?!
Did he just not get what I was saying? Did he not understand? I have no clue, but obviously we are not going with him.
