City Kitchen Catering

I would NOT recommend City Kitchen to anyone. With our reception at the Houston Museum of Natural Science we were limited to 4 catering companies for food and one, City Kitchen, for beverages due to liquor licensing.

I booked my reception at the Museum over one year before my wedding to secure the Museum and began communications with City Kitchen at that time regarding both food and beverage. When they were not responsive (6 months later) about a possible menu or pricing we began talking to other caterers. The menus they provided were fine but not impressive and the price was not really a factor whether we contracted them to provide food and drink or just drink the price was about the same and their customer service was completely lacking so we decided to have them for beverages only. After many emails and calls from us with no response or the occasional response that started with an apology like "I'm so sorry it's taken us so long to get back to you, we've been absolutely swamped with events in the last few weeks" which read more like "I'm sorry that it's taken over 4 weeks for us to get back to you, we are working on a day by day basis and cannot plan ahead so that we are not scrambling at the last minute". We finally had a complete and correctly figured contract the Wednesday before the Saturday of my wedding.

During the event the bartenders seemed unaware of when the event should have been over so the DJ had played the last song and the overhead lights were on before the bar decided to stop serving my guests. It was my understanding that we were to have "last call" 15 minutes before the end of the event so people would not be surprised about the event being over but evidently (and not surprisingly) that was not communicated to the City Kitchen staff.

Since our wedding we have been working to get a finalized contract with accurate charges on it. They tried to charge us for over 10 additional bottles of champagne than we served and more guests than we had attend. City Kitchen is not running a tight ship and has shown no sign of improvement over the last 14 months when we've been attempting to work with them - I would encourage anyone looking at their services to continue looking - it's not worth the dedication required for tracking them down to provide mediocre, yet highly priced and very apologetic, service.