I didn't set up an actual event with California Dreaming, but had reservations for 9 for my girls and family. The service was excellent and of course the food was great!
GREAT atmosphere! Very easy to work with and very accommodating!
The site was BEAUTIFUL and very spacious. There are places where it's much quieter for those people that don't want to yell over the music. There are tables right in the middle of things, and there's the porch for smokers. We had our reception inside (utilized the bus shed for wedding party parking). The only complaint that I had was that the lady in charge (Daria) sided with our caterer (see that review) and seemed to be pushing us out early. When you rent the facility you have it until midnight, but by 10pm Daria was helping break tables down and turning lights on...
Nancy Lefter is an excellent organist and she is also on top of things at the chapel. The sexton will also keep you on task and will help with the rehearsal and small details. No complaints about this site/vendor at all! Also, the place is absolutely, astoundingly beautiful...
Dear Michelle,
Your company catered our wedding reception on February 27, 2010. We wanted to say first of all that we enjoyed the food, thought it was very good, and did not hear one bad thing said about the food from anyone that attended our reception. Thank you for that. We both thought you did a terrific job on the food and also the presentation of the food.
We did have some issues with your service overall however. We contracted with you and your company to provide food for our reception, initially from 630pm to 1030pm. We then revised our contract, paid you extra -- for an additional 30 minutes, as we wanted the reception to begin at 600pm and go through 1030pm. Although neither of us was actually at the reception at 6pm, it is our understanding that you did indeed begin serving food at the agreed upon, contracted time of 6 ‘o clock. Nowhere in your contract, or in your words to us, did you say that the time you were hired for included the cleaning up and breaking down of tables, etc. In fact, it was specifically mentioned by us that there would be food available from 6pm to 1030pm and you confirmed that. That was not the case in practice.
We had the Visitor’s Center until midnight and were supposed to stop playing music by 11pm. We were enjoying the reception and had every intention of wrapping things up by 1030pm in order to meet the requirements of the Visitor’s Center, however before 10pm we began to see you and Daria talking with other vendors and asking when they were going to be finishing up. That was completely unprofessional and not your role to be doing that. Your role was to provide food and the rentals from Snyder. During our last dance, you and Daria even had the overhead lights turned on and most of the tables broken down. Many of our guests (especially the wedding party and our families) had to go looking for their belongings because your company had moved them from tables in order to remove the tables from the Visitor’s Center. Neither of us would have had any problem with your company and employees breaking down tables that were out of the way and not being utilized anymore, but we took offense to our guests’ personal belongings being moved out of YOUR way.
As we were preparing to leave the venue, after basically feeling as though we were being kicked out, we were stopped by one of your employees and handed the top tier of our wedding cake. We were getting ready to go outside and have pictures taken of our departure, and we had a cake to worry about. We had hired a coordinator in order to not have to worry about those kinds of things...
It should have been our night to enjoy and to end at the time we wanted. We had fulfilled our obligation to you by settling our bill prior to the wedding day (with the additional money for the extra half hour of service we requested) and we should have been treated with more respect than we were, and our guests and other vendors should have also been treated with respect. We do not feel that you handled yourself very professionally throughout the process.
We would like to be compensated by your company for taking the responsibility on itself to clear food and tables prior to the contracted time and get a refund for the extra half hour that we paid for and did not get. We would be glad to come and pick this up from you or you could send it to the above address.
Further, in the future you might want to explain to your brides and grooms that the service time in your contract includes clean up and break down of rental tables etc, so they will be aware of that when they begin to decide for how long to hire you. It was certainly not clear to us and we would have required more time (and paid more) for our guests to stay comfortable and not feel pressured to leave.
We will be posting a copy of this letter on the Wedding Mapper website (www.weddingmapper.com) where we have reviewed all of our vendors. Also, we will be brutally honest with anyone that asks regarding the lack of customer service we received from your company. Again, we will take nothing away from the quality of your food or the presentation of the food – both were excellent.
Thank you,
Steve and Jami S
Cake was excellent! On the day of the wedding I got a call from the decorator who had concerns about my choices of icing colors, so we changed it on the day of the event and it was gorgeous! It was delivered on time and it was perfect.
The flowers were fantastic!!! They were fresh (she got them the night before) and beautiful. Claire also did our decorations for the recpetion - which also included flowers and a ton of other stuff. She was very professional, very helpful, very accomodating, and just wonderful! For example, I had given her a number for flowers for the men and hten we decided to have an extra reader for the ceremony. Well, in the midst of everything else going on, I forgot to tell her to add one. Well, no fear. She was there for our rehearsal and noticed and made one for him, without ever talking to me about it. God bless her! I would recommend her to EVERYONE, and I have!
Leslie and Doug do fantastic work. There are several issues that we had and continue to have with them. One is their general business practices. They weren't very proactive when it came to calling and confirming things, they were a little scatterbrained, and we still have not received our wedding albums (and at this point we have been married 7 months). When they sent us our bridal portraits they didn't package them very well and they were all so wrinkled that we will have to purchase more in order to hang them in our home. Which ends up being an extra cost to us. I have designed my own wedding album and can have it in my hand in 7-10 days but they continue to tell me that it will take "months" for the printer to get the albums done. I proposed that I could purchase the albums I designed and extra portraits for a small refund ($300) but in response I got not one but 2 nasty emails back from them not addressing the questions that I asked or the proposal I made, just them being defensive. They also accused me of giving a nasty review of them on wedding wire (website) but I had never heard of that website - I will gladly sign all of my reviews. I have been honest and up front in all of them. If you are a bride and groom that don't care about time lines and strong business practices, feel free to hire them...
My man looked SHARP!!! No problems with Men's Warehouse - and their colors matched my colors exactly. Also, we paid the $30 for the "deal" where if you have 4 people rent tuxes for your wedding, then the groom's is free. Sweet deal!!!