Blog

Last Saturday we catered a gorgeous wedding at Midway, Utah’s beautiful River Bottoms Ranch. During the photo shoot, one of the brides was having trouble keeping part of her dress in place. The planner had forgotten to bring fashion tape, so she approached a member of our team and asked him if, by any chance, he might have some tape to help fix a dress.

“Like this?” he offered, producing a roll of fashion tape.

The planner was stunned. “Why do you have that?” she marveled.

He smiled. “We try to be ready for anything. You wouldn’t believe the things we’ve seen.”

It’s true.

As Utah’s top full-service caterer over the past 35+ years, we’ve handled everything from wardrobe malfunctions to faulty plumbing to venue kitchen equipment that stopped working in the middle of service. We’ve weathered scorching heat and sudden snowstorms, dealt with misbehaving pets and misbehaving guests, helped moms with fussy babies, cleaned up messes, and met more emergency deadlines than Dinner Impossible.

Being ready for surprises is part of our job.

In fact, if you look inside one of our emergency kits you’ll see evidence of the surprises we've dealt with and the lessons we’ve learned over the years. Safety pins and bobby pins, fire extinguishers, feminine products, gaffers tape (even better than duct tape), sunscreen, breath mints, batteries, jumper cables, dryer sheets (great for repelling bugs), needles and thread, hair ties…the list goes on.

And, of course, you’ll also see plenty of those universal necessities: towels. (Douglas Adams wasn’t wrong.)

Full-Service Catering

Being ready to handle any contingency is part of what makes us different from many other services that are called “catering” nowadays. Unlike food catering (where a restaurant or other company prepares the food, drops it off, and maybe helps serve and clean up afterwards), full-service catering covers every aspect of your event from planning and set-up to final take-down and clean-up. Hiring a full-service caterer means that, no matter what issues arise, you can relax knowing that it will be taken care of, and your day will go off without a hitch—or at least, if there are hitches, your guests will never know about them.

Our team has put out all manner of metaphorical fires over the years. We’ve scrubbed dance floors on hands and knees, shoveled guests out of snowbanks, and even thrown ourselves in front of sprinklers that turned on suddenly in the middle of a garden party. But the way we see it, full-service catering is about more than just being ready for emergencies. It’s a philosophy that governs what we do and but why we do it.

The Alfred Ethic

In the movie Batman Begins, Michael Caine’s character, Alfred, delivers a line that captures the essence of what we strive to be. At a low point in the movie, Batman/Bruce Wayne turns to his family’s butler and asks, “Why do you give a damn, Alfred? It’s not your family.”

Alfred replies, “I give a damn because a good man once made me responsible for what was most precious to him in the whole world.”

We feel a similar responsibility every time a client asks us to cater their corporate event or private party, or a couple hires us to handle their wedding. We are acutely aware that they are placing one of the most important days of their life in our hands, and we do everything we can to honor that trust.

In the entryway of our Pleasant Grove offices, next to the Best of State medals and trophies, hangs a reminder of why we do what we do at Culinary Crafts.

Whether we find ourselves getting grass stains out of a dress, retouching a guest’s hair, accommodating a guest’s dietary needs, preparing food boxes for the hungry couple to take home, or literally diving into the deep end of a pool to retrieve something a bridesmaid dropped, we try to be ready for anything because taking care of people is our mission. It’s what we love. Being a full-service caterer means doing what it takes to make sure our clients succeed and their visions come true. More than the awards, what makes us proud is the service we give.

Because to us, even if you’re not family, you’re family.