Vegan Catering in Colorado – AVOID WaterCourse!

I will say that July 6, 2019 was one of the happiest days of my life, regardless of the awful aftermath of working with Watercourse Catering to provide a totally vegan wedding dinner. The dinner itself was incredible. The food was fabulous, clearly high-quality, and all the guests, vegan or not, enjoyed the meal. Unfortunately, the behavior of the Head Chef Forest, and the owner of Watercourse, City O’ City and Make Believe Bakery, Lauren Roberts, outweighed the experience of the food and I personally would not recommend them to anyone planning a vegan wedding or event.

We had our wedding at Winding River Ranch in the mountains of Colorado, on the doorstep of Rocky Mountain National Park. There are cabins at the ranch that can house approximately 45 of your guests, as well as camping spots for those wanting to tent or van. As a result, most of our guests stayed onsite.

There’s a commercial kitchen on the premises, where we cooked our rehearsal dinner and hosted a brunch the morning after the wedding. This kitchen was also used by Watercourse’s catering crew, led by Forest. Also of note, Forest came to the ranch in advance of the wedding and got a tour from the ranch site manager and wedding coordinator Kristin. He was given a full run-down of logistics, available resources for cooking and cleaning, and expectations.

I first discovered the mess left by Watercourse on Sunday morning after our wedding, when I walked into the kitchen to begin prepping brunch food for our guests. Inside, I found my husband’s parents cleaning pots and pans that were covered with grease. As you can imagine, it made me feel terrible that our family spent the morning cleaning the catering company’s mess, rather than enjoying the post-wedding festivities.

The ranch site manager, Kristin, had already been in and had steam cleaned the floors because they were also covered with grease and grit, to the point where it was dangerous. Looking up above the kitchen bench, all the pots and pans hanging above were also coated in grease because Forest had set up a makeshift fryer under them. Instead of putting the fryer under the hood in the kitchen, he put it on the main bench, and the grease shot up onto all the cookware hanging there. There were actual pools of grease left of the floor and huge greasy puddles next to the sink.

 

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On our wedding night, my husband and I had arranged to eat early, separately from our guests. We did this to make sure we got a little time to ourselves, and also to make sure that we actually ate! The plates that Watercourse fixed us were huge, and we couldn’t eat it all. I went into the kitchen to ask that our plates get wrapped and saved for later. I spoke directly with Forest, who assured me not to worry, that there would be plenty of leftovers. When I opened the fridge on Sunday morning to find them, however, I found nothing besides a bowl of mashed potatoes. No leftovers anywhere to be found.

On top of it all, we were told by the venue managers that Watercourse had thrown out what the staff estimated to be nearly 15-20lbs of food. Fresh food: lettuce from the salad, cauliflower from the fried cauliflower, in addition to cooked food. The ranch staff saw the caterers had put all this food into trash bags before they could intervene. The food was then fed to their pigs, a fact the caterers later used to justify that it hadn’t truly been wasted. I had wedding guests that visited the animals that morning tell me that they saw the pigs eating the same food that had been served the night before at our wedding.

The combination of facts:

1. That we had specifically asked for food to be wrapped up, and it wasn’t.
2. That food was not only not saved for us, but it was thrown into garbage bags.
3. The amount of food – in the range of 15lbs – that I paid for, and that was thrown away.
4. The condition of the kitchen: so greasy we had to clean it before feeding our guests the next morning, and that the groom was scrubbing a pot that mashed potatoes had been burned to the bottom of.

I contacted Watercourse and brought these issues to their attention. Forest called me the next day to apologize, but he also claimed two things: that he had, in fact, put food in the fridge and that they’d cleaned to the best of their ability but no one was there to assist them.

I am dumbfounded as to why the Head Chef at a popular Denver restaurant wouldn’t be able to clean a kitchen – simply to leave it as he found it – without external assistance. All the tools were available to him to do it, but they were in a hurry to leave the ranch and get back to Denver. One of his excuses was that he couldn’t find the ranch site manger, as if he needed someone to tell him if it was clean or not. Lauren would later tell me over email that I could have paid extra for a Watercourse site manager, apparently to guarantee the kitchen would be clean after they trashed it. Which is absurd. In addition, the fact that there were no leftovers anywhere made it very clear that Forest was lying to me. I don’t know if he didn’t tell his serving staff to save it, or he forgot, or what actually happened, but that food wasn’t there. The ranch staff literally dumped it out of trash bags to feed the pigs. There can be no doubt that they lied about saving it.

 

Pigs eating nearly 20lbs of food thrown out by Watercourse

Watercourse catering fed the pigs after our wedding instead of leaving us our leftovers

Thus ensued a weeklong tit-for-tat communication with Watercourse, in which Lauren, the owner, refused to apologize, made it clear that she didn’t believe me, questioned everything I told her, and made both my husband and I feel terrible and disrespected. She was horrific to deal with, at one point on the phone, after I mentioned that I had previously worked in catering and worked weddings and so was speaking from experience about standards, she literally said to me: “Well I guess that makes you an expert.”

In part of her email response to the “inquiry into the events” that she undertook, she wrote to me:

“We have concluded that due to you not being able to locate your leftovers for two, and not being satisfied with the cleaning, we will credit your card $190. We feel disheartened that in place of remembering an excellent staff serving high quality, made-from-scratch, plant-based food prepared on-site at a lower cost, you instead are left with the feeling of disappointment over an error in cleaning expectations, and missing leftovers. We will certainly use this experience to learn and grow so that we do not have any future miscommunications like this again. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, and the credit should appear on your account sometime between Tuesday and Thursday.”

In reply to this, I wrote:

“I know that the staff at the ranch, who have weddings every weekend, were shocked at the quantity of food left in those trash bags – to the extent that they photographed it. Whether the food made it to the animals or landfill doesn’t concern me so much as the fact that I paid for the food that was thrown away.

You continue to mention site management and professional cleaning in reference to the condition of the kitchen. All we expected and asked for was that the kitchen was left as it was found. My family and I cooked in that kitchen on Friday night, and we used it Sunday morning to cook brunch for our guests. Would you like to call my father, the groom’s father, our mothers and put them on trial as well? We can provide extra witnesses to the condition of the kitchen if necessary. In my opinion, clean is not interpretive, either something is clean, or it is not. If everything is still covered in grease, it is not clean. I don’t think I should need to pay you for professional cleaning services in order to have the kitchen you used left as it was found. I also don’t think, as a professional catering company, you should need a site manager, or a third party opinion, to know whether or not something is in fact clean.

You also mention “plant-based food prepared on-site at a lower cost.” I will just say that I got quotes from 2 additional catering companies, and yours was the highest by far. I chose to go with Watercourse because I loved eating at your restaurant and was confident you guys would knock it out of the park. Little did I know I would be embattled in a 2 week-long “he said, she said” argument over feedback from our event.”

In the interest of total transparency, we paid $4,800 for food to feed 75 people, so $64 per person. The fact that it was that expensive, AND they wasted that much food, adds insult to injury. Not only that, but Lauren chose to credit us a total of $40 for our plates that should have been saved, rather than $128, which is what 2 meals worth of food actually cost me.

In reply to my email, Lauren wrote me a one-line response thanking me for my feedback and saying that they already processed the credit. They then called the ranch staff, and rather than actually speaking with them about the incident, just told them they had resolved it with us. Another lie.

Based on all of this, I would recommend that folks steer clear of Watercourse catering unless they are happy to document everything the night of their event and go into battle should anything go wrong. This is a company that clearly doesn’t care about their customer relationships.

Here are some other vegan caterers we investigated who would be worth checking out instead:

Wong Way Veg: Food truck. Vegan “comfort food.” Reasonably priced, winner of the Westworld 2019 Best of Denver.

Orange Crunch: an award-winning Food Truck & Caterer specializing in BBQ, Asian Fusion, American, Italian, Mexican/Latin, French, Mediterranean & Global Cuisines and Desserts. Specialize in Award-Winning Gluten-Free, All-Natural Empanadas.

Three Leaf Catering: More upscale. From their website: Be it a vegetarian or vegan menu from the kitchen of Leaf, ethnic specialties from the kitchen of The Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, or a traditional family-style Italian dinner from the kitchen of Zucca, our combined staff of experienced chefs allow us to excel in a variety of cuisines.

Pines Catering: Again, slightly more upscale. These guys are featured by The Knot and Wedding Wire, and are actual professionals with lots of options and add ons should you need them. Their site specifically says they can create a vegan or vegetarian menu, but they don’t feature one.

Vegan Van: Traditional, American-style vegan food. Reasonably priced, great reviews. Have a van, will travel.

Tasty Harmony: Located in Fort Collins, Colorado. New to catering but has amazing food. They haven’t posted a menu yet and logistics of where and how they cater are uncertain.

The Gold Leaf Collective: They have a food truck called Silver Seed. You can book this fabulous and unique little food truck for your special event.

Mercury Cafe: they serve all local & organic food. Food and appetizers can be selected from their regular menu or co-created. They have catered Polish, Balinese, Cuban & Indian Cuisine, and of course Italian & Mexican.

* Have you recently used a vegan caterer for an event in Colorado that you loved? Let me know and I’ll add them to the list!