Let me preface this by saying that Oz was a very pleasant, nice guy to work with. He was always prompt with responding and very accommodating, but on the day of the wedding, when i...t actually mattered, and nearly 5k in the hole later - none of that mattered.
We let Oz know how important it was to have a vegetarian and vegan entrees available for the wedding. No, I'm not talking about just preparing a few on the side for a couple of vegetarians, I'm talking about entrees. We did a tasting of the stuffed eggplant, and it was delicious! Oz would also whip up a few vegan entrees for the vegan guests.
What we got: No grilled stuffed eggplant at all. Vegetarians were forced to eat salad and bread for their dinner. He made an 'executive decision' not to make the entrees we paid for last minute and instead served sliced pieces of raw, cold eggplant.
We paid extra for Oz's staff to serve the meal from the buffet line, give out water for water service, slice the pies and hand out to people, and pour the champagne toast:
What we got:
- Guests had to serve themselves.
- No water service, there weren't even glasses for water as we discussed.
- Pies were ordered to be whole so that we could stick a flag in them to let guests know what they were eating - no, they were placed on the wrong table (they were supposed to be under a table that had a pennant banner reading 'TRY SOME PIE'), pre-sliced without ANY signage, and also without forks!! Guests had to eat mystery slices of pie with their hands.
- Any banquet server knows that you should have a tray when passing out a champagne toast to guests. In this case, there was no tray, and Oz's 2-person staff passed out champagne glasses 1-2 people at a time, and delayed the toasts by nearly half an hour. A fed up guest that works in the restaurant business had to jump up and help them out.
We let Oz know we wanted baked macaroni and cheese, not the regular mac and cheese, as we had sampled it before and didn't like it.
What we got: The regular mac and cheese.
Other strange things:
- The food was ice-cold; and guests let me know.
- The beef brisket was nothing like we had tasted - the cut of meat was all fat and people did not eat it.
I know no wedding is perfect, but you'd think after missing out on an entrée we paid for (plus the vegan entrée!) the complete absence of service that we tipped out while signing our contract, bad food, and general oversights for almost everything we paid for, we'd at least have some sort of reimbursement, right? It's very obviously a disaster. No, we got $200 back. That doesn't even cover what we tipped for his staff's 'service.'
Heed my warning now, folks! We overpaid and weren't really even sure what we were paying for in some cases, and we didn't get delivery on half of it. Treat your guests and your pocketbook well - steer clear.