Three stories of event profs who saved the day
What looks like smooth sailing on the surface can hide a lot of fancy footwork under the water. We don’t need to tell you that. Three brave meeting professionals agreed to fess up to times things did not go according to plan and how they righted the ship. See if any of these sound familiar.
An International Coffee Crisis
From Maria Ingaglio, Event Manager at Abigail Kirsch
During UN Climate Week this year, we catered a meeting for a major world leader at the United Nations in New York City. Challenges leading up to the event included a last-minute change in location, Secret Service sweeps and street closures. One vendor partner missed the most important item on our order, 80 coffee carafes that were intended to be guest-facing and needed for us to fulfill our contractual obligations. Instead of panicking, our team quickly jumped into action.
We parallel-pathed three solutions:
1) The rental company rerunning the items—mind you, the initial delivery took four hours longer than expected due to additional security screenings.
2) We worked with a local event space to lend us 1/4 of the carafes we needed—their full inventory.
3) We attempted to purchase the carafes from local restaurant suppliers— none of which had close to the quantities needed.
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Thirty minutes before guest arrival with plans one and two in motion, the client asked us to have the room set within 10 minutes, moving up our agreed-upon timeline. As they made the request, I received a phone call that our vendor partner was rolling the 80 carafes across five avenues (on foot!) to make the deadline. With 5 minutes to spare, the carafes arrived and we were set for service 15 minutes before the original plan. The client was impressed not only by the quality of the food and service but also by our professionalism and ability to handle a crisis without missing a beat.
This quick thinking saved the day and strengthened our reputation as a catering company that can deliver despite uncontrollable challenges. Major props go to our vendor-partner who put the hustle into making sure we could do our jobs that day! And major props to our service team that was prepared, positive and ready to help by any means necessary.
The Great Chair Swap
From Brittany Glover, Director of Marketing, Constellation Culinary Group (Formally special events manager)
We catered a corporate holiday party on the 50th floor during the busiest weekend for holiday events in a building where loading anything in is challenging from accessing the loading dock to waiting for the freight elevator. The theme was winter wonderland—clear, white, icy blue, silver—but the chairs delivered were a total mismatch.
With less than a couple of hours before the event began, we placed an emergency re-run order with our rental company who delivered a new set of chairs just in the nick of time. While they weren’t the exact chair the client selected (they didn’t have them in stock last minute) this substitute style actually looked even better than their original selection! The event was a success.
Beef Substitute
Bonus story from Brittany Glover
We catered an intimate wedding at a private residence at the New Jersey shore. It was the typical set up—tented outdoors, kitchen set up in their garage. As the guests’ entrée orders were coming in, we flagged that the servers were noting “filet” and not “short rib” as we had planned on serving for the menu. We needed to either:
1) Find 15 filets to serve in place of the short rib, as this is what the client listed on their menu cards.
2) Let the client know of the discrepancy and serve the short rib.
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The first option would result in a happier client but it posed significant logistical challenges. We needed to not only find 15 filets but they needed to be partly cooked—we didn’t have time or the means to cook raw steaks from a local grocery store. We started calling local restaurants to see if anyone could accommodate an order ASAP.
We were able to find one, so I drove out to pick up the order while our service captain wined and shmoozed the guests to buy us some time. We brought the steaks to our chef to finish to temperature onsite and plate and made it just in time for entrée service. The event was a success.
This article appears in the November/December 2024 issue. You can subscribe to the magazine here.
