So you screwed up... but I might get the blame

I had a situation at a pretty fancy wedding rehearsal dinner that we did this weekend. We catered 3 meats and 5 sides. Rented all the china, silverware, water goblet, champagne and wine glasses. Set everything up and everything went great.

I am writing this for your thoughts on what happened though. The family came in from out of town and brought friends who run a bakery to do the dessert which was key lime pie. We were pretty much finished with dinner and standing back watching everything with a smile on when the two dessert guys came up and said "We screwed up, we don't have enough pie to feed everyone here" I asked what are you going to do and he said "We are just going to start at the front when when we run out we're out" Now at this point I thought you dumb SOB's you knew the head count I'm sure because I knew it for months. We watched them squirm as they passed out dessert. Then it dawned on me, there were 105 guests there and they don't know the family brought these guys in for the dessert. As far as they know our company is catering it and our trailer with logo's is parked outside. So when these guys run out of pie these guests are going to think that we ran out of pie and it will look bad on us. Keep this in mind if you let another caterer do desserts or something like this.

As it turned out they asked guests if they would like a slice of pie instead of giving everyone a slice and enough said no that it worked out and they did not run out. I even had a slice and it was great, I will give them that.

Armor we did brisket, pork and chicken.

PorkQPine That is what we did also, our food was in the rear on a buffet but at the end of the meal the two guys who were bar-tending went to the kitchen and
plated the desserts and went to each table passing out desserts. It would be hard pressed for people to not think the other caterer was not part of the same crew in a case like I went through his weekend. Nothing short of an announcement or something.

One other thing that happened that I forgot about. The client rented water picture for each table. We were not contracted to serve guests, just serve our food on the buffet. When the pictures of water ran out that she got people started asking us to refill them. We did it the best we could but was not staffed for this. Again people could think we were not doing our job refilling the pictures that we had nothing to do with.