The venue we booked for our wedding uses Gilmore catering exclusively, so we had to use them.
Things we liked about Gilmore catering:
- the food was amazing! It was a perfect tem...perature when served, and came out quickly and in a timely manner. People also thought the new york strip we served was a filet, it was that good!
- Kim was a pleasure to work with. I found her prompt, brief, and concise responses very refreshing. If I emailed her, I knew I'd get a response at roughly 6am the next day, it was incredible!
- The rest of the staff were very kind, knowledgeable, and easy to work with.
- They were very flexible and accommodating with their COVID rescheduling policies (we rescheduled from fall 2020 to summer 2021).
The things we didn't like:
- Guests who ordered steaks were not given steak knives even though we had specifically discussed steak knives being placed at the details meeting. I know this seems like a small detail, but literally everyone I've talked to has commented on how it was weird they didn't get a steak knife.
- They tried to change the bar time the day of the wedding. We had to shift the event time due to a noise ordinance that went into effect between us booking the venue and the event. I think this caused some confusion the day of because we had the event ending and the bar closing at the same time (11pm). The event manager told my mom an hour before the wedding and that the bar would need to close at 10:30 since the event ended at 11pm. We had had a few other conversations about the bar leading up to this that were discouraging (we wanted to open the bar before the ceremony but weren't allowed, etc), so them changing the timeline for the bar at the last minute was very upsetting. We ended up paying the DJ to play for a extra 1/2 hour so that the bar could stay open to 11 (which did break the noise ordinance, but we haven't heard that we've been fined for that yet).
- They had a few other strange policies in place that we had to jump through. I understand that they have boundaries that they have to have in place and they have rules they have to follow, but they were the only vendor we had that told us "no" to some of our requests/questions, instead of working with us on some of our requests (which we would have happily paid an additional fee for).
Gilmore owns a few restaurants in the west Michigan area, and we'll absolutely still be dining with them, and I will still recommend this caterer to friends and family holding events. I think I'll just be warning people to check the fine print on their contract.