D'Serving Spoon

 

291

1511

Kevin S.

San Francisco, CA

D'Elicious.  D'Fresh.  D'Hot.  D'Original.  D'Versatile.  D'Organized.  D'Responsive.  D'Professional.  D'Unique.

My employer provides lunch for us every Monday and Friday at our office.  We have been using a wide variety of caterers and restaurants to provide these lunches, but quality and variety have sometimes been challenging for some of our vendors.  With 200 diverse hungry hardworking mouths to feed, we needed to spramp up the rotation and bring in some fresh options, and I was on the informal committee that got the job to find new sources of catering.

When our food coordinator started contacting restaurants that get rave reviews, one of her first calls was to Patio Filipino (based on my glowing reviews, natch) thinking it would be interesting to look into adding Pinoy food to the repertoire.  Patio in turn put her in touch with Michelle Noguera at D'Serving Spoon, which is allied with the company that owns Patio and three other Pinoy restaurants.

When Michelle and Bambi, her colleague, arrived at our offices to go over our requirements, I was immediately impressed with her level of professionalism and customer orientation.  She was not there to run down a list of dishes and make vague promises.  She asked all sorts of probing questions about our employees, how the other caterers take care of us, and what lunches are successful and which ones aren't.

Then she insisted we come to one of their restaurants to do a full-press tasting of Filipino food, and along the way informed us that her catering business also does half a dozen other cuisines, and has just added cupcakes to the roster of products available.

What followed was a thorough, and thoroughly delightful, process.  We picked a representative group of employees and went to Ongping Noodles to taste dishes from the catering business.  We were treated like kings and the food was absolutely delicious.  We made some observations about the need for lots of variety in vegetarian options,  and Michelle and her team quickly turned out revised examples of two dishes remade in a vegetarian mode.  Even better than the originals!  But that wasn't the end of it.

She insisted we come back the next week to taste Italian food.  It was amazing!  We suggested slightly less sweet seasoning in two sauces and we were assured our requests would be honored.

We quickly decided to bring them in--they fit our per-head budget and the food was outstanding.  

For their first meal, they did a Friday pasta lunch, with four kinds of pasta and salad, which were all wildly popular.  Previous caterers tended to provide glutinous, bland pastas.  D'Serving Spoon brought in table linens and chafing pans and served the pasta right, for the same cost as our other vendors.  The difference in care and quality was obvious to our employees.

A couple of weeks later we took the plunge--there are only a couple of Filipinos in our company--and Michelle's team arrived with a selection of Pinoy favorites including a tofu sisig they customized just for us.  Another grand slam!  

This is a high quality, responsive, customer oriented operation and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them for any catering job.  

By the way, I tasted the cupcakes.  Perhaps the cupcake craze has peaked, but Kara's and Miette should be embarrassed by how much better this little company's creations are, at a much more palatable price point for company events.

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