I was deeply unhappy with the experience this chef provided and it has stuck with me for months. We…read morepaid him to come and be a personal chef for my wife's birthday party since she is always the one who cooks for everyone else so I wanted to give her a gift of not having to worry about it at all and still having a good, quality dinner at her party. After the initial meeting with him we were optimistic. He seemed to be excited to work with us and find just the right menu to bring. We knew going in that we were a small gathering to cater for and told him explicitly that if he had something bigger or more lucrative the same day of the party to let us know and we'd completely understand if he turned us down.
He reassured us after some days that he would be there. The day of the party however, he arrived four hours late. When he finally did make it, he turned on our barbeque outside to use for the meat like we had talked about, and walked up to the kitchen. He was up there for another hour or more as the grill stayed burning. We asked him multiple times if he was still going to use it and he kept telling us he was about to, but by the time he actually did he had burned almost completely through our full propane tank.
The food itself was disappointing. He told us he had experience with the dishes he was preparing for us: enchiladas, smoked mac n' cheese, red beans and rice, and a table wide charcuterie board. The chicken in the enchiladas was dry and flavorless, he told us he smoked the mac n' cheese multiple ways but it was barely noticeable, the red beans and rice was so undercooked that both the beans and the rice grains were still crunchy and there was no flavor to them. The charcuterie board itself was alright, not as flashy as he had sold it to be but the meats, cheeses, fruits, and nuts were as described. My wife and I asked many of our guests what they thought of the food because we wondered if our tastebuds just weren't working but they agreed with us.
When he had finished with his cooking, he filmed our party to promote his business, which we had not consented to at any point and even tried to get our guests to repeat something they had said so that he could get it on his phone. We were being polite but I was taken aback in the moment and was not expecting that kind of behavior at all.
To top off the night, we saw him shelve another full pan's worth of enchiladas that had not been put out back into his supplies and he left behind his cooking bag with knives and an assortment of raw ingredients which we then had to deal with. He never contacted us to retrieve it. As for the pan of enchiladas, I don't think they were good enough that we would have even eaten them, but we had splurged and spent a few thousand dollars for his service and it just felt like a final insult to not even let us keep all the food we had paid dearly for. We saved the rest of the food but it truly was not tasty at all. I like to eat just about everything but I was genuinely not excited to eat these leftovers and that made me sad. I don't like to waste food, but none of us were eating it in the days following and it ended up in the compost.
I wanted to give at least two stars, the charcuterie board was okay enough, the food was edible at least. But as I wrote this review, I realized I just cannot bring myself to do it. I am just so sad about this whole thing and as I wrote at the start, this has stuck with me as an upsetting memory for months. I wanted this to be the one chance for my wife to have a truly worry-free and delicious display for her party and we couldn't even get any part of that.
Any of these issues on their own I could excuse, even him being four hours late. I wish I was exaggerating. But the sum of these issues was so maddening, the experience so poor, that I feel I need to let other people know so that they don't have the same experience from this company that we did.
Thank you for your time.
