Wooden Paddle Catering — Local services in Lemont Township

My husband and I got married three weeks ago, and hosted our reception in our backyard. Similar to all the other 5-star reviews, we had a phenomenal experience working with the Wooden Paddle.

We planned our wedding in about a month, so we came to Wooden Paddle asking if they had availability pretty last-minute as far as wedding planning goes, and by luck/chance they still had one pizza truck available (which is what we really wanted to serve at our wedding).

We ended up doing a food tasting at their restaurant prior to selecting which pizzas we wanted to move forward with, and if I had any regret, it’s only that I didn’t have a budget large enough to cater their entire menu. 😂 Literally everything we tasted was phenomenal (apps, meats, pastas, pizzas, salads, desserts, the cocktails…..DELICIOUS). We ended up choosing the following pizzas: Margarita, Smoke + Shrooms, The Buzzkill, and Rocketman. The pizzas were a huge hit with our guests. Even my 1st generation Italian grandma was impressed with the pizzas (and bless her, but she is extremely picky comparing anything in the US to Italy, lol). We ended up selecting a drink package that had ‘signature’ cocktails included as well, and the cocktails were raved about all evening, and people are still telling me about how much they loved them.

I’m not sure if this was something that was supposed to be apart of our package or not, but we had ordered a cake that wasn’t purchased through Wooden Paddle because we wanted something very specific, and they jumped in and were so kind to help slice it all to serve for our guests, which I honestly wasn’t expecting and had low key been initially dreading all night. The staff at our event were extremely kind and professional, and I felt like they made magic happen getting pizzas from where they were parked right outside our house into the tent in our backyard seamlessly. I swear, the pizzas were never empty until they saw that people were slowly lowering their consumption. They fire off the rest of whatever is left of all the pizzas at the end of the night and they box them for you, and our guests loved them—we only had one box leftover and it’s literally because someone forgot it as they were trying to gather all their kids to leave (which was a blessing for us because we didn’t get to eat much while talking to people all night, and we were so thrilled to have a pizza for ourselves once everyone left 😅).

Wooden Paddle as a company was great, but I’d also like to say that if anyone has the opportunity to work with their catering manager Nicole, that she is an ABSOLUTE GEM of a human. If you are panicking trying to nail down the details of your catering, whether it’s with Wooden Paddle or another company, boy do I hope you have a Nicole in your corner. She helped us understand everything, and was super accommodating and quick to answer any questions we had. We had a slight catering issue come up about a week before the wedding was supposed to take place, and she helped resolve it quickly and super professionally. I can’t speak highly of Nicole enough.

Overall, we loved our experience, and we can wait to go back for future dinners (because we truly loved the...

We had Wooden Paddle cater our wedding and it may have very well been the best decision of the whole wedding planning process!!!

From start to finish, the Wooden Paddle team was an absolute pleasure to work with. Chloe and Miriam were the dynamic duo that worked with us to figure out what was best for our special day.

We enjoyed the tasting in their restaurant and were completely blown away with that process as a whole. If we weren't already sold at the thought of having their pizza at our wedding, trying every delicious additional item was the "nail in the coffin" as they say. Every darn bite was more amazing than the last. We both were in AWE of everything. The hardest part of the whole process was narrowing down what we wanted. SO MANY DELICIOUS CHOICES.

As we got closer to the event, Chloe was absolutely wonderful with helping us make any changes to our menu, pick out the perfect linens and prepping us for what's to come on the day of.

On the day of our wedding, let's just say we blew everyone out of the water with having Wooden Paddle as our food choice. They brought a massive pizza oven on site and cooked every pizza live in front of our venue/guests. Talk about leaving a lasting impression huh?

Not only was the setup wonderful, but the service was a 12 out of 10! The servers were prompt, extremely friendly, super genuine and looked to be having an amazing time just being there. I remember many people commenting on how wonderful the service was. Just IMPRESSIVE!!

Now....to the most important part...the FOOD! All I can say is WOW. Just absolutely blown away with how wonderful everything came out. From the apps (the charcuterie table was a game hanger) to the fantastic pizzas coming out flaming hot and just melting in our mouths, it was THE BEST food I've ever had at a wedding...and even more so since it was our wedding. We had an insane amount of compliments on the food that night and still have people reminiscing about the delicious pizzas. It truly was the best decision we made during our wedding planning process.

I would recommend Wooden Paddle to any and everyone looking to make a lasting impression with a catered food...or even just a fun night out for dinner. This team is sharp, incredible and super fun to work with. I always appreciate working with people that feel like friends and I can easily say that Chloe and Miriam are now like friends. THEY ROCKED!!!

Thank you Wooden Paddle for everything. We absolutely cannot wait to come back and enjoy your delicious food on date nights and are already planning on celebrating our 1-year at your restaurant. You are wonderful and we appreciate all that you helped us do on our...

We recently used Wooden Paddle for our wedding day caterer. While we were very excited to use Wooden Paddle for our caterer for our wedding as we love the restaurant, the fresh food to table concept, etc. the week of the wedding I would say our expectations fell a bit short. We found out the night before our wedding that catering manager (we loved her, she helped us customize our menu, meet our budget, etc) who had been overseeing our account was no longer with Wooden Paddle with two weeks of no communication leading up to the day. While we understand turnover happens this added some unnecessary stress as we did not receive an email until about 8pm the night before the wedding. Luckily we had hired a day-of-coordinator to help with any last minute logistics regarding this the morning of to take the stress off of us. Overall we had good reviews from our guest about the food and food quality being really good. We just had some tables that seemed to maybe have better portion sizes than others and at times the mother of the bride asked us for additional food from our sweetheart table. We were under the impression the food would be plentiful and we would have leftover pizzas at the end of the night to take home and that was not the case. While we love Wooden Paddle and do plan to dine at the restaurants again, we are just hoping our wedding fell through the cracks a bit and future weddings will have a better experience. To end on a positive note we loved our final tasting night that we were invited to by the restaurant and got to meet the owners and they really took interest in the couples getting married, getting to know us more and our wedding day vision, we loved this...