Chef Pete Coleman — Local services in Cotati

We had Chef Pete cater our wedding a few weeks ago. It's taken me a lot of time to write this review, mostly because I was unsure of whether I wanted to put my energy into writing a negative review, but at the end of the day I feel like this is a good way to get all my feelings about it out of the way so I can leave just the good memories to reminisce on later.

We paid for 57 guests and we were also charged for our photographer's food since I requested he eat at the same time as guests. This ended up being money wasted since he was fed late anyways. From the get go, Chef Pete's communication was lacking. This should have been red flag #1 but I convinced myself he was just busy. However, even down to one week before my wedding he stopped returning my texts. Mind you, it was a text from me trying to pay him the money I owed him! I didn't hear back until a few days before my wedding.

Our food service was incredibly slow and portions were not at all what I was expecting for the price per head. Our reception dinner ran almost an HOUR late, and even then dessert still hadn't been served! We had to move everyone inside for the cake cutting, and ended up just serving the dessert on the dessert table, which I was not happy about. Portions were tiny, and I could tell guests were still hungry by the end of the night which was the complete opposite of what I was hoping for when I initially chose to hire Pete.

We had two guests with dietary restrictions. Only 2!! Yet our vegan guest was given his food late for all the plates, and they gave the meal placard for our other guest with dietary restrictions to the wrong person! So one of our guests without dietary restrictions randomly had to eat no pork and seafood for absolutely no reason. This is completely unacceptable.

All of our venue staff and my event coordinator agreed his service was extremely unprofessional, in fact our venue took him off of their list of preferred vendors. I could tell this myself because even after all the delays, he never came out once to say hi to us, let alone apologize for the errors. I learned the next day from my event coordinator that the reason for the slow service was that him and his team arrived 2 hours late to the venue. Absolutely insane behavior for the money we paid him.

The only positive I have is that what little food we were able to eat was pretty tasty, and that his wait staff was professional. If you have any other options for catering, I'd advise you to stay away...

Chef Pete and his team are fantastic!

We found him on Thumbtack and luckily we did because the food was superb! He catered our wedding at Lucie Stern Community Center in Palo Alto this past weekend. We did a taco station for our appetizers and picked his farm to table wedding menu for dinner to feed our guest list of 130. So many people came up to us saying how good the food was and said they went back to the buffet for seconds!

From the beginning, Chef Pete and his team were super accommodating and was willing to work with our budget. We were able to have a call with him to have all our questions answered too. We were able to do a tasting and bring two of our friends and they were impressed with our caterer pick. We also got to talk with Chef Pete during this time and he's a very chill guy to talk with. His team were very professional and fun and we would definitely work with...

Pete and his team catered my wedding of about 100 guests at OVY Camp in San Gregorio, CA. We opted for a buffet and chose a modified version of his California Italian Deluxe menu. Let me say, the food was phenomenal! Guests raved about everything, even the vegetarians! We had quite a few dietary restrictions and the team was able to make it work. We also used a bar tender through Pete and had a "modified bar package." Overall, we were very pleased with the price, quality, and experience.

As someone who is a bit type-A with communication and documentation, I would have preferred quicker communication that was in email format, instead of primarily relaying on phone calls and texts. I made sure to summarize our calls and texts in emails to meet my own preference. In the end, we were very happy with the results and still can't stop talking about and hearing from guests how good...