derryX Wedding: The Food

This series of posts showcases the lovely images of our wedding as captured by Andy Kainz Photography (with the help of Marcie Pry) along with some stories from the big day.

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Leading up to the wedding, you wouldn’t believe how many people assumed the food at our wedding would be incredibly fussy and formal. From the start, we intended for it to be as far from that as possible. We really wanted everyone to enjoy themselves and to enjoy our time together. Delicious food was obviously a priority.

In all of the more organized affairs, my favorite part is unquestionably the cocktail hour, so we decided to have all of the food cocktail style. There were a handful of items being passed as well as a handful of waited stations where people could get as much to eat as they wanted.

To execute this, we enlisted Elegant Touch Catering. We ended up talking to a number of on-site catering services, but they gave us the best price, understood the vision, and were familiar with working at Indian Ladder Farms. As it turns out, we had a bit of a last minute contract disagreement (which I’ll explain a bit later), but, as far as we can tell, the food service on wedding day went off without a hitch.

The theme that we were going for was comfort foods. Cassie listed a bunch of her favorites, and I listed a few of mine. It all came together to form a pretty cool menu. Elegant Touch had us in for a tasting, and we were very pleased with the execution of the food.

On wedding day, there were a bunch of cool things going on.

There were also Southern Fried Chicken Sliders (Mini chicken sliders served with roasted pecan aioli), and Country Ham and Pimento Cheese Biscuits. (But no pictures)

And, of course, we had lots of dessert.

The level of service provided by Elegant Touch on wedding day was very high, and the one lady who works with both Elegant Touch and Indian Ladder made a tremendous effort to personally cater to Cassie and me. We were very pleased with the food and service.

So here’s the story that brought our experience working with Elegant Touch down:

Our original proposal contained wording that states “All of our proposals include not only your customized menu, but in-house chef prepared cuisine, display tables lavishly decorated with second-to-none displays, waitstaff including bartender and bride and groom captain, dishes, flatwear (sic), glasswear (sic), linens and garnished serving pieces as applicable.”

On the final bill for reconciliation, there were two listed out items for tables required for the displays, totaling $68.50. We thoroughly reviewed each charge item-by-item, and I went to the bank and made the check out for the amount in the final bill. For the record, this charge barely comprises 1% of the final bill, but we felt it was underhanded to sneak a charge like this in at the last second.

When I stopped in to make the final payment, as I handed over the check, I inquired about the disparity between the wording in the original proposal (where the display tables were clearly stated as included) and the final bill. This was a very uncomfortable conversation with the owner of Elegant Touch. After seeing the original proposal on paper, she became incredibly combative and downright nasty. I didn’t push. I left saying something like, “look; you already have your money; I just want you to know it’s not right, and we noticed.”

There was a little trepidation on our parts that they’d take it out on the service that night, but, again, on the day, they were professionals, but I guess we paid a little extra for them to be professionals.