San Diego Wine & Culinary Center

If there was a way for me to give this place more than one star I would for one simple reason - they nearly single handedly destroyed my wedding. Here's what happened:

We made an appointment to visit SDWCC in June 2009. At the time they were under new management, affiliated with the Art Institute. The new manager, Kevin, and the site coordinator, Amanda McPhail, seemed to be very competent at the time. I should have known what we were getting into right away. It took them about 2 months to get me menus and another month after that to get a contract. And I think I only got these that quickly because my fiancee and I hounded them non-stop nearly every day. Every time we were met with excuses about meetings (Amanda), or events (Kevin). When we finally got the contract, we were told the date we selected was held and we didn't have to submit the deposit or contract until early in 2010. So we held off on doing anything else - which I'm glad we did.

In January 2010, we tried to contact Amanda regarding some changes to the contract so we could get our deposit in - no response. We kept trying and finally got a message that she was no longer with SDWCC. After trying to get ahold of Kevin for about a week, I was finally contacted by the person we thought would be our new coordinator. We met with her and her boss that weekend and thought everything was okay. She took our contract changes and said she would get them added and back to us, which she did. Problem was that the new contract was COMPLETELY different than what was originally discussed and about $4000 more than we were originally quoted. Now here's where it gets interesting...

We were contacted by Amanda a week later saying that she was back in the employ of SDWCC, that Kevin and the entire staff had been fired and that the original owner was back in charge. At this point we were also informed that they no longer had catering, only wine so we would have to re-do our contract. Basically, they threw out our contract, told us we needed to pay $5000 effing dollars for their crappy site and that none of the wine and soft drink prices negotiated would be honored. So that basically did it in for us at SDWCC. Good thing we were able to find another venue.

If that wasn't bad enough, what really pissed me off was Amanda's attitude, about how she didn't recall items that were in the original contract, how she wouldn't return our phone calls, and basically seemed peeved that we were able to see through the bullshit she can obviously lay on her other moronic clients. I go to a lot of meetings, but for an event planner, she was apparently required to be in meetings so often she could never return a call or email, or do the things she said she would do. And the new owner is no better. Dude - you don't gain more business by charging 3x as much for your space as any other equivalent place in San Diego and providing NOTHING for it.

So in a nutshell - avoid SDWCC and Creative Affairs by Amanda at all costs!!!! These people are horrible business people, horrible people in general and I can't wait until their crappy business sense leads to an "Out of Business" sign on their window.