José Andrés Group — Local services in Washington

Y'all. I love José Andres. I love every restaurant I've ever been to of his. I love China Chilcano where we recently hosted our rehearsal dinner. But I will never, never never host another event with them ever again. The good: Matteo. Our event manager on the night of our rehearsal dinner. We loved him. He made a bad situation turn positive and is the reason I am giving a three star review instead of one. The staff, generally, were also lovely and attentive. The food? Excellent as it always is. The bad: when we booked the event originally, we loved our event manager. She left her position and we were reassigned someone else. He was a nightmare. Our troubles started when we made a change to our event menu and he attempted to renege on the original pricing associated with our contract. He then pretty much ignored half of my emails after that got resolved. (If you work in events YOU HAVE TO COMMUNICATE WITH PEOPLE. I don't care if you are waiting to hear back on something, let me know that?? Don't go two weeks without responding to an email??) And then, many of his responses were riddled with autocorrect errors. My guy you have one job, and that job is communicating with guests. The Ugly: we had a lot of allergies in our group including two anaphylactic allergies. I asked how allergies were handled multiple times and offered to make a seating chart at least three of those times and didn't get an answer until the day before our event. And on the night of the event, allergies were asked for at each table (even though they had our complete list) and food was then dropped with no explanation of what was in the dish. FUN FACT. One of our anaphylactic allergies was a shrimp allergy and they dropped shrimp dumplings with no warning to that person. Thankfully I knew what they were having had them before and was able to warn my guest. I could not have been more furious or stressed out. Not what you want at a rehearsal dinner. And the order of "drop the dish with the allergens first and then drop the substitute dish 5 minutes after, and explain what is what THEN" is wrong. Drop the substitute dish first. Which is eventually where we got to. Or! Just say you can't accommodate allergies! Or! Let people make seating charts! Tl;dr: Give Matteo a huge raise, he was the only event manager doing his job on the night, and I wish I had worked with him since day one. The restaurant staff is warm and knowledgeable. Once we got into a substitution rhythm, we had a great time. But at this current juncture, I would advise anyone reading this to not plan any events with Think Food Group unless everyone can eat the entire menu or unless you're okay with risking someone going into...

Having worked under this company I would NOT RECOMMEND THEM. Not only have they been withholding pay for SEVEN MONTHS but they are apparently IMPOSSIBLE to get on the phone or get a response from via email, phone, voice mail, or social media. I've never had a harder time reaching a company, and I've never had so difficult a time being reimbursed for time worked. They exhibit BAD business practice, BAD communication skills, and they do NOT seem compelled to correct it. DO NOT...

I am a big fan of Jose Andrés' food, techniques and politics. The spaces he creates are as good as the food. Thoughtful and diverse, what's...