Last Vendors Standing

My last caterer post is probably still fresh in your minds because of how ridiculous his shenanigans were. A recent meeting with another caterer, helped to show us the extent of how ridiculous Mr. S was.

As you may recall, Douglas is in Blacksburg, VA, for a paid internship with Modea. Since he's up in the Roanoke area, he's able to meet with vendors that we would otherwise have trouble meeting with. He's already met with one potential DJ and more recently met with a caterer that we've been dancing with since day 1. The most recent part of the dance was in a recent post.

Blue Ridge Catering

Douglas called them the morning after our less than mediocre meal from Szechuan. We were so excited to learn that Blue Ridge still had our date open and anxiously waited to set up a meeting! Douglas was able to take that meeting earlier this week. Without having met any of these folks yet, but having heard them talk and heard how they interact and perform - I cannot stop talking so highly of them!

Blue Ridge was one of the first caterers we bookmarked while doing web searches. They had a nice array of sample menus on their website and those gave us the sense that they'd be able to pull off the types of food that Douglas and I eat (nothing fancy or spicy). Since we first contacted them through their website, Mark, the owner, was quick to get on the horn with us and hear about what we were trying to achieve with our event and what types of foods we liked. Positive #1 - interested about the event and inquired about our food interests. Positive #2 - On the phone, Mark sounded genuinely intrigued by our ideas.

The first time we said "thanks, but no thanks" to Blue Ridge was because of me. Having just started to look at the cost of wedding stuff, I couldn't get over the sticker shock. After spending a few more months in Wedding Budgeting Land, we realized that Blue Ridge was actually really close to what we were budgeting anyway - this brought about our third and latest revisit. The second time we said "thanks, but no thanks", we had made the decision to go with Szechuan after weighing the two, our favorite two, food options. You've already read about how well our family tasting of Szechuan went, so that brings us to this week and our third revisit, but first meeting.

Sadly, Douglas was not able to meet with Mark due to a sudden death in the family. Mark offered to either reschedule or keep the meeting and have Douglas meet with a member of Mark's staff. Positive #3 - Making sure we're taken care of even in the face of a family emergency, but also prioritizing your own family. Major points. So Douglas shows up to Blue Ridge and is greeted with a plate of desserts! Positive #4 - the first caterer/food option to provide any food-item whatsoever. Positive #5 - Douglas said they were reaaaaaaaaaaally tasty. The meeting didn't take long, but sounded like it went really well. We all already had three versions of menus that we had emailed back and forth throughout our revisits, so no time needed to be spent on putting a menu together. They discussed tweaks and what-if-we-swapped-this-item-for-that-service. They were easy going, eager to listen, made suggestions and adjustments on the fly, and came across as genuinely wanting to ensure that we had a great time at our event - NOT that they showed off at our event.

So here we sit (though in different states), waiting for two more versions of the menu to pop into our inboxes. We already know they come highly recommended and have a great reputation. They provide their own staff. They want to get you the food you want, make sure you'll enjoy it, and present it in a proper way. As has been the case with our other vendors, we knew when it was right. I do feel a little stupid that we've been circling this vendor the ENTIRE time we've been planning, but this is why I took my time - to learn from my mistakes and be able to correct them. I feel 100% better dumping a buttload of money into Blue Ridge, knowing that we'll all enjoy the food, than throwing it to Mr. S and knowing no one would enjoy the food.

What's on the menu, you seem to be asking. I'm going to keep that one under my belt for now. I can share one thing that this caterer was totally awesome in providing as an option, but will definitely not be making an appearance (due to cost, sadly).

A clothespin s'mores bar (not a photo of Blue Ridge offering)

Clothespin Smores Station
A Chef Tended Station. Graham Crackers & Bittersweet Chocolate w/ Mini Clothespins, dipped in Marshmallow and torched to order.

Alas, there will be no s'mores at the reception. In light of this reality, here is how I see myself spending my time between wedding-to-do-stuff the week before:

Stop 1: Fork in the Alley or Fork in the City for fresh s'mores

Stop 2: Polished for mani/pedi

A Potential Vendor Talks Himself Right Out of the Running

The vendor search.

I don't know anyone who really enjoys this task. There are parts you may enjoy, like finding your baker and getting to taste lots of cake, but the overall experience does not fall into the category of "things I look forward to while wedding planning".

Fortunately for us, we haven't had too many bad experiences. My dress shopping was very smooth with some great ladies helping us out at the shops. All three of our potential bakers were a pleasure to sit down and speak with. The venue folks have been a little hit and miss at first, but that's mostly because we're booking while details like pricing and availability are being worked out for the facility as a whole. And then there have been the caterers...

Up until last month, our biggest issue with the prospective catering options were the prices. While in town during our wedding planning weekend, almost all of our vendors recommended Center Stage Catering. We reached out to them, and sadly, they are booked on our date. Also, during the weekend, we met with the potential caterer that we've been talking with since almost day 1. Up until this meeting, we had been speaking with the owner's wife and she was great. This meeting, however, we were going to be meeting with the man himself, Mr. S (name is being withheld because family in the area still use their services, and we don't want to do anything to hurt those relationships). I had done research on all of our prospective caterers and the reviews on this one were very consistent: the owner was very difficult to work with. We went into the meeting keeping open minds, but also knowing that this wasn't necessarily going to be a walk in the park. Turns out, we really didn't need to be prepared at all!

During our entire meeting, at no point did Mr. S ask about any details about our event or what we had in mind. Instead, he used the entire meeting to showcase his iPad, make sure we knew that he had plenty of decorations and linens and dishware that we could rent or that he might "throw in", and go into detail about how important it is to make it look like you spent thousands of dollars, even if you didn't. We learned that the event really isn't important, it's how much food you make it look like you have, how high end it looks, and the significance of having decorated candle stands of three different heights to keep the table from looking flat. Some of his ideas had a decent intent behind them, but he did a terrible job at selling them.

For example, I don't think the way to sell someone on getting shrimp is to say "I fill a bucket with a lot of ice and then lay some shrimp on top of the ice so it looks like you have a full bucket's worth. It looks like you've spent thousands of dollars on shrimp, but it's really just a few shrimp. Then, I make them very spicy so that Uncle Bob doesn't go up and put 5, 6, 7 shrimp on his plate. They're hot, so people will eat less. That saves you money which you can then spend somewhere else, like linens, which we have in this beautiful purple and black pattern."

Let's dissect that, shall we?

Creating the illusion of more food than you have - not a terrible idea. Presentation can be important. If you buy two dozen shrimp, I don't see the harm in creating the illusion of three or four dozen. I do see the harm, however, in making six shrimp look like fifty (a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point).

Spicing up the food - the concept behind this one isn't bad, in moderation. I do not want to pay for four dozen shrimp, a dozen of which end up on Uncle Bob's plate and half of which don't get eaten. You don't want to waste your money on food that isn't going to be eaten. However, if we've somehow been able to work in the fact that we can't do spicy, this isn't the best proposal for the same reason as not spicing it up. Why would we want to waste money on a few high end really spicy shrimp that no one can eat? I'd rather err on the side of paying for more food than we need than paying for an entire dish we know people can't eat. Mr. S seemed to pride himself on this type of hocus pocus with food, which disturbed me. I'm all for finding ways to cut corners, but if we're not even trying to put on the illusion of a high end wedding, why does any of this matter?

Other than finding out first-hand about the size of Mr. S's ego, I also heard the sales pitch that I swore would get any vendor immediately vetoed. We were sitting at the corner of the bar during the entire meeting, myself and Douglas on one side of the corner in the bar with Mr. S facing us on the other side of the corner. When he gets to this point in his pitch, he leans in toward me, arm on the bar, head tilted forward, arm outstretched so that his hand can point and gesture emphatically in my direction to drive the point home: "This is YOUR wedding. You have an idea in your head of what YOU want YOUR day to be. It's all about you." At this point, Douglas and I forcibly work in that it's not the way we're think of it at all, it's OUR day. To which Mr. S responds "Sure, but it's YOUR day and YOUR vision."

Don't you DARE try to sell me a bill of over priced goods on the back of a delusion of being a selfish princess for a day! The earlier parts about the shrimp already had my brain going all

but this set off all of the bells and whistles. There was no way this guy was going to be our caterer. However, this ended up being early on in the meeting, if not half way through, so we still had to sit through a lot more of Mr. S's ego-stroking. When it appeared that the meeting was finally drawing to a close, I got very excited that we'd soon be free! Then, the icing on the cake, Mr. S made sure to strongly suggest we reconsider the original menu he sent us - the original menu that didn't even remotely hit the type of food we wanted.

Douglas didn't come away from the meeting with the same bitter taste that I did, but I really didn't expect him to. He wanted to give them another opportunity to propose a menu to us and see whether it better fit what we needed, so I agreed to giving them one last chance. Douglas sent off a menu idea based on one another potential caterer had put together that well illustrated the type of food we were interested in. Today, Douglas had a phone call with Mr. S about that suggested menu. A looooong phone call that involved more listening than talking. The look on Doug's face told me everything - Mr. S was doing the same thing on the phone that he did in the meeting, selling his vision without asking anything about what we were doing and not letting a question get in edgewise. When Douglas recounted the conversation for me, I learned that Mr. S decided to go full on difficult, so much so, that any difficult vendor or scenario related to wedding planning will now be referred to as "getting Mr. S-ed".

It went a little something like this:
"I can do chicken tenders, but do you want me to go to Sam's and buy the cheap frozen stuff or do you want the really high quality product? Same thing with the burgers, what size are the patties? What type of buns do you want? Do you want the cheap stuff from Sam's or the good stuff?"


If you want me to pay you a few thousand dollars for your services, why would you even suggest that you would run to Sam's to get the product?!?!?!  To quote a former co-worker of mine "I don't know what kind of dope those guys are smoking over there..." A unanimous exclamation of "DICK!" pretty much put the nail in the coffin for Mr. S catering our event. Mr. S will be sending us another menu proposal and after that, we'll be done with Mr. S. If this is the crap we're putting up with before we hand over our money, I can't imagine the crap we'd be putting up with day-of or even week-of. No thanks. We are not knowingly inviting a mountain of extra stress and paying a ton of money for it! That's just insanity. So another caterer bites the dust.

All hope is not lost, though. We still have the option of food provided by Doug's favorite local chinese restaurant, and we still have a caterer that we ended up revisiting who has been awesome to work with so far, especially compared to Mr. S. We're still in early talks with this catering option, but we're hopeful it will be an affordable and fun option.

Lesson learned: as soon as those bells go off in your head, don't give the vendor a second thought. It's really not worth the extra aggravation.

Planning Weekend Recap: We have a Baker!

Hello, again.

If you've been following along, you know that this past weekend, Douglas and I went up to Roanoke for three days of nothing but meetings related to the wedding. We had appointments with the rabbi, a venue, a photographer, two catering options, and three bakers! Don't worry, we'll get to everything.

Let's start with the one part of wedding planning I was really looking forward to (and really enjoyed) - cake tastings! We chose bakers who all worked out of their own homes in Roanoke, VA.

Three bakers. Three days. Three tastings.

Unfortunately, Douglas and I didn't go into these meetings being as prepared as we would have liked to be. Typically, we'd come in with at least a rough idea of what we wanted. We came in with "we're not doing fondant" and that was about it. We had only started discussing the wedding cake, past the cake and icing selections for the tastings, a few days earlier and neither of us really had a strong idea of what we wanted. Luckily, all three bakers were fine with that. Being unprepared, we were able to spend more time talking about us and our ideas for the wedding so that the bakers could get to know us and our style instead of spending the time simply designing the "perfect cake". One of the bakers even emailed us a follow up pointing out how much she enjoyed the appointment because she got to know her potential clients.

Let's start at the beginning. I apologize for the lack of photos, but we were having so much fun, the cake was gone before I even thought about breaking out the camera!

Friday - Baker #1: Kelly's Cakes
For Kelly, we got to choose three types of cake and three fillings to try. She whipped those choices up as cupcakes which we then split.

Flavors sampled:

• Yellow cake with raspberry filling
• White cake with chocolate mousse filling
• Marble (chocolate/vanilla swirl) cake with an oreo cream filling

Highs and Lows:

1. All three flavors of cake were very tasty and moist.
2. The buttercream icing was sweet but not as sweet as you'd find on most birthday cakes.
3. The raspberry filling was also tasty, not too sweet.
4. The chocolate mousse was a let down as a filling. The mousse itself was quite tasty, but it just didn't do anything for us with the cake.
5. Kelly actually used a chocolate pudding with crushed oreos filling instead of the oreo cream filling for our tasting. This filling with the marble cake was very good! It ended up being our favorite combination from this tasting.
6. Kelly was very easy to talk to and had a photo album of past cakes for us to look through. 
7. Kelly's husband had a bookshelf full of zombie books which included the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. This endeared them to us very quickly.
8. Our meeting with Kelly had a very relaxed vibe to it. I felt like we were more likely to design something birthday cake-ish with Kelly. That wouldn't be a bad thing considering we're going for a relaxed and fun vibe for the wedding.

Saturday - Baker #2: Cakes by Lisa
For Lisa, we got to choose one cake and one filling to try. Lisa put this combo together in a 2 layer 6" round cake (essentially the top tier). If we wanted to try other combinations, she would make any additional number of cakes for $15/cake (cost of ingredients). We went with two combinations to try.

Flavors sampled:

• Devil's food cake with raspberry filling
• Marble cake with chocolate mousse filling

Highs and Lows:

1. Typically Lisa leaves the cakes out of the fridge for a while so that you are able to taste the cakes as they would be on your wedding day - at room temperature. Unfortunately, due to her busy appointment schedule that day, she wasn't able to have the cakes out for too long before our arrival.
2. The chocolate mousse was once again a disappointment as a filling. The mousse itself was very tasty but the cake with mousse filling was underwhelming.
3. The devil's food cake was by far my favorite cake out of the weekend. There is nothing quite like a well done devil's food cake. 
4. Douglas really enjoyed the raspberry filling which seemed to have been made from real raspberries (seeds and all). 
5. The buttercream icing was sweet but wasn't too sweet and was quite tasty. There was a proportional layer of buttercream icing to the cake and the combinations worked well.
6. Lisa had about four photo albums of previous cakes for us to look through. She had a decent variety of designs. After sharing our story of the ring Douglas used to propose, Lisa threw out the idea of doing sugar printing of some of our favorite comic book cells to drape over the cake. A very interesting concept.
7. The reason I pointed out the temperature factor in the first bullet is to point this out in this seventh bullet. We took what was left of the sample cakes home with us and left them out for the rest of the day. We then served them as dessert after a family dinner. The cakes were definitely at room temperature at that point. What a difference!!!! The cakes were phenomenal! All of a sudden, the mousse filling worked amazingly well with the marble cake. The devil's food with raspberry was devoured! There was barely a crumb left untouched of either cake by the end of the night. 
8. Our meeting with Lisa was relaxed but still felt a bit formal. The cake we started to design had more of a traditional feel to it with some quirky design features to give it personality. Also, not a bad thing since this is still a wedding. 
9. In discussing the chocolate pudding and oreo combination we had at our last tasting, Lisa left the table, grabbed the left over mousse from when she made our cake, crumpled some oreos into it and let us dig in! If you have an idea of something you want, she's game to try and make it work. While I'm not sure whether we'll be adding the oreos to our mousse filling for the cake or not, I can tell you that Douglas and I left no mousse left to get tossed out.

Sunday - Baker #3: Casey's Cakes
For Casey, we didn't have to make any decisions on flavors. She provided a spread of cake flavors with buttercream icing in the form of many cupcakes.

Flavors Sampled (of the ones we can remember):

• Raspberry cake
• Chocolate raspberry cake
• Blackberry cake
• Dreamsicle cake
• Amaretto cake
• Key lime cake
• Strawberry cake
• German chocolate cake
• Red velvet cake
• Marble cake
• Chocolate cake
• Almond cake
• Lemon cake

Highs and Lows:

1. Out of the three bakers, Casey's was the least sweet buttercream icing. It was still tasty, though.
2. The typical flavors didn't wow us: chocolate, yellow, marble. But some of the special ones did: raspberry, blackberry.
3. The cake was full of flavor. When biting into the blackberry cake, I felt as though I was one step away from having juice in my mouth! 
4. Casey had a large number of photo albums of past cakes for us to look through. Out of the three bakers, she had the most variety in her cakes flavor-wise and design-wise. I really dug her hexagon shapes, especially when she mixed them in with the standard rounds or squares. 
5. The feeling of this meeting was very laid back and casual. It was like sitting in a friend's kitchen and running with any idea you could come up with. This meeting was the only one where we ended up designing an entire cake. We were able to take elements from different cakes in her photos to put something interesting together. 
6. Since we had too many cupcakes to try during our visit, we were able to take some back with us to NC. On our trip back, Douglas and I weren't feeling too well and feared that it was the cupcakes that were upsetting our systems. We decided not to rule Casey out until we sampled the rest of the cupcakes after dinner. The cakes were still moist and full of flavor, but we realized that the flavors were simply too strong. They were fine for a bite or two, but no one could see anyone eating an entire slice of cake. 

Summary
No matter who we were going to go with, we learned that we would be looking at a 3-4 tier cake with buttercream icing and different flavors of cake on each layer. The cake would cost us less than $500 depending on the design work we would end up wanting. Cake delivery, set-up, etc. was all included in the cost and the top tier was always offered as a gift.

We learned that we do not like the idea of an all white cake. It needs some personality and color to it. We found some different ideas of designs and how to work in our wedding colors that we may/may not end up using in the long run. We won't be covering the cake in fondant, though there may be some elements of the decorations that may end up being fondant.

After taking a day to come off of our sugar high from days of eating cake and buttercream, we reviewed our experiences with each baker and what we thought of our samples. The choice was very easy to make for us and was based on the cake and icing.

Today we emailed Lisa to book her for our wedding! We have a baker! We enjoyed her cakes so much that we're already planning to ask if she'll do two more sample cakes for us to purchase for when we get all of the parents together in town for a sampling of the wedding menu. We can't wait! We ate so much cake from Lisa and never felt heavy, bloated, or overly full. Just typing about it is making me crave another slice of that devil's food cake!

Douglas and I got an added bonus while meeting with the bakers - insight into the local caterers. One name kept popping up as a highly recommended option. The catering story, though, is for another post.