My company hired Best Catering for our annual summer family picnic, serving several hundred people at an outdoor park. It seems to have been the "Original Picnic BBQ" menu selection.
The food wasn't good. There was some romaine lettuce with unspecified dressing on it, some pasta salad dripping in oil, burger + hot dog buns with a decent variety of condiments (though way too few serving tools!) and a few grill pits cooking hot dogs, brats, small beef burgers and veggie burgers. I had a burger and brat, with the 2 sides; the burger was tiny and the brat was cold inside. The pasta salad was disgusting. A coworker said that there were several bags of buns that were moldy when he was going through the line. Their disdain for accommodating vegetarians was clear, story follows:
My family of 6 has 5 vegetarians (I'm the only omnivore), so before getting food I scoped out the options and watched how they were cooking the veggie burgers. They seemed to have a designated area for cooking them, and were using a different set of tools to cook them, which I confirmed by asking one of the employees. After waiting in line for about 20 minutes, my family got our plates and burger buns ready and proceeded to wait for a batch of veggie burgers to come off the grill. As we waited, we saw basically every area of the grill that wasn't reserved for veggie patties have some form of meat cooked or placed upon it. As some hot dogs were being moved from the "cooking area" to the "serving area" of the grill, several were dropped on top of the still-cooking veggie burgers. This wasn't even a 1-time thing; after dropping one load of dogs on them, the exact same thing happened again. All but one of the veggie burgers was contaminated at that point. Around that time, someone came by to ask what we were waiting for, and I explained that we were waiting for veggie burgers but just observed meat being dropped all over the ones that were cooking, and would like a new batch of veggie burgers to be started. She didn't seem to believe that this would happen, and went and confirmed with the woman at the grill, who seemed VERY annoyed that she was "caught".
I was told that it would be about 10 minutes for new veggie patties, and that they'd start them right away. They did start them, but on a section of grill that had just been used to hold brats that were ready to serve. The first batch of veggie burgers were done cooking, and promptly served to a bunch of vegetarians that had no idea they had been contaminated by hot dogs being dropped on them - this is shady behavior, not sure if it's a food handling violation either. At this point, there seemed to be some issue under the grill, so the employees needed to remove one of the three large grilling surfaces. To do this, they moved all of the meat that was currently cooking on it TO THE DESIGNATED VEGGIE COOKING AREA. There was no longer any area of the grill that they hadn't cooked or held meat on, and I was just done. I asked for a few slices of cheese to put in each burger and made the most of it.
If you care about the vegetarians you plan to feed, please do not hire this company. They'll hide the fact that they're serving meat-contaminated food while pretending to follow vegetarian-sensitive grill discipline, and roll their eyes if you dare to complain about it. read more
