The FoodSmiths

a strawberry mint lemonade infusion that we made into my signature drink with vodka or champagne and everyone was raving about it. When first meeting with Gretchen, she was incredibly nice and friendly and gave great suggestions for the wedding. However, we did have some issues after this as noted below. Overall, compared to many caterers it was more affordable and I think it was really high quality food for the price- although, a few months before our wedding, many months after signing our contract, Gretchen contacted us to say the price was going up by over $400. Needless to say we were really upset about this after having already agreed on a contracted price and budget for it. I understand that labor prices rose through the end of COVID and price of goods are increasing as well, but it felt unfair to us to change an agreed upon and contracted price. She did provide us with paper plates and utensils at no extra cost however and worked to try to minimize the price increase by minimizing the amount of staff needed for the event, but we were still upset. The other hiccup we had was that they were bartending for us and providing a basic soda and garnish mixing package for drinks. A few days before the wedding we told them we were recommending a Cosmo as a drink for guests so they could plan to bring extra cranberry and lime juice. The morning of our wedding, they emailed us to say that wasn’t included in the basic mixing package. Needless to say that’s a huge stressor to receive that email the morning of our wedding- after going back to the contract and reading the fine print, the package only included soda and garnishes (which is shocking to me to call it a basic mixing package if you don’t include any juices like cranberry or lime). After some back and forth and informing her we did not in fact have time to go out and buy mixers on our wedding day, they ended up providing some for us (and my mother in law picked some up for us as well), but made it clear we should have informed her of this sooner. While the issue was solved, it was definitely a major stressor morning of our wedding and had I not checked my email, we would have not had ingredients for one of our signature drinks- or mixers for other basic drinks that we thought were being provided. Obviously we should have planned this sooner and she may not have had time to get to the email until Saturday, but her response to us in this situation and in the situation of increased price felt lacking in empathy and kindness towards us that we felt so strongly from all our other vendors. Overall we were very happy with the food and got tons of compliments from our guests, but the hiccups along the way definitely undermined how great everything else was.