We went to a company holiday party thrown at one of the employees' houses. I thought LRE was fine, but nothing to write home about. There were about 40 people and only 3 different hors d'ouevres. Plenty of quantity, but for that many people they should have done 4-5 different items. I don't know what budget constraints they were working on, but still. One of the hd's was exquisite, a bite sized cheese souffle on a paper thin croustade with some sort of tiny apple "tartar" (that's what they called it. I think that was a bit pretentious.) There was a Vietnamese spring roll, which had okay texture, but almost no flavor. I thought it might have had crab in it, but it might have been vegetarian - too bland to tell. The third hd was a flat bread with potatoes and cheese. If you only have three, you shouldn't have 2 that are cheese-centric!
The buffet dinner service included roasted veg., salad, steak on skewers and penne pasta. First let me mention the only cutlery available was forks. If everything had actually been "forkable" that would have worked well, since often guest are standing and only have one hand available at these things. Unfortunately the pasta was the only thing easily consumable without being cut up.
Roasted vegetables were cooked just the right doneness for me, but the only one that was adequately seasoned was the portabello mushrooms. There were also halved sushi turnips (lovely to look at with their greens still on, but impossible to eat without looking rude, and they badly needed salt.) Red Bells, which again lacked seasoning and cut in very inconsistent sizes - some 1/2" wide, others nearly 2" wide were joined with tiny baby carrots, that were bite-sized enough, but had only their slightly above average native flavor, no added seasoning evident.
The salad looked good, butter lettuce, thinly sliced radishes and a very mild tarragon blended vinaigrette. Here too, and most surprisingly since it was a salad, the lettuce leaves were left whole, so one had to either take several bites while keeping the leaf on one's fork, or (what I rudely did most of the time) cramming the large leaves in as is, with extra assists from the fork to get it all in in one bite.
The skewers were beef of a not terribly tender cut, but kept rare so they weren't tough. They had good flavor, but were quite chewy, so again, 2 not so good choices - trying to bite off pieces from the skewer (very hard to do successfully) or using a fork to remove the pieces from the skewers and then trying to cut them with one's fork, also not very practical.
The pasta had softened leeks and what looked like uncooked baby arugula, but it had zero arugula flavor, so I'm not sure. Again, very underseasoned.
We left just as tiny bite-sized desserts were coming out. I tried one of each of the only two varieties, and they were pretty, but I couldn't really tell you what they were.
Servers were sweet and very available, but the one serving most of the hd's had a very heavy accent, so I couldn't understand his description very well. They were very attentive and handled some specialty drink requests seamlessly. I saw the chef sneak in and out once or twice, but I never actually saw anything being cooked, so not sure if it was all prepared ahead, or if they had some other place to do the "a la minute" prep.
I wouldn't write them off, because they seemed efficient, and I don't know what kinds of challenges they faced with this client, but I wasn't overly impressed either. read more
