Pampered Palate Catering

Skip has recently sold his business to another catering company (A Tasteful Affair) and is in the process of starting a winery in Napa. Catering is clearly not his priority so I would recommend going with someone else, especially for your wedding. I tried scheduling a tasting through Skip for over 6 weeks. After many attempts over several weeks to get a hold of Skip, I was in contact with him 3 times. Each time he told me he would check the schedule and get back to me with tasting times, but never got back to me. He assured us that the date was available so we kept waiting and waiting but here we are over 5 weeks since I last spoke with Skip (and 3 month since I first reached out) and NO RESPONSE.
I completely understand that he has moved on and this isn’t a full time job for him anymore, but it is not acceptable to drag someone along for that amount of time, especially when planning a wedding. If you can’t handle the business then just say that or send me directly to work with the new company? When I finally decided to look for other caterers, many of them were already booked for my wedding day-​9 months out. In the end, I am working with Checkers Catering and could not be happier. I got a response from them within a half an hour of reaching out on a Saturday evening at 10pm and they have been nothing short of amazing since. I have every ounce of confidence that my wedding day will go smoothly.
Nothing personal against Skip or Pampered Palate, but if you want someone who is responsive and committed, I would recommend looking elsewhere. This is the last thing you want to stress about when planning a wedding.

My Husband and I used Pampered Palate for our wedding in August after they catered my brother in laws wedding. Skip is very direct and to the point. I had a very special request because we got married in my parents back yard and we wanted long wooden Italian family style tables we would not be able to do a buffet (to hard for people to get up out of their seats). I wanted a family style service (we weren’t interested in plated because I was worried about cold food and the amount of time it would take for everyone to be served). We were set on big bowls of food to be delivered to each table. Not very many caterers will offer this and the ones that do will charge you a pretty penny for it. When we sat down with Skip he was willing to accomplish our wishes under our budget. We had a first course of salad and pasta (unbelievable, the food really speaks for itself, go in for a tasting and you will be impressed). The second course was stuffed chicken breast, scalloped potatoes and asparagus. The food was brought out quickly and I had tons of compliments on how wonderful everyone thought it was. I have had many people ask for his information for their events. The only thing that kept me from giving 5 stars is that we had a little trouble after the wedding with our personal items getting misplaced. This is probably due to the fact we had the wedding at our own private residence instead of a venue where they are used having large events.

My bride and I can’t say enough about Skip and his company the Pampered Palate. Skip’s food was unbelievable and his service was outstanding. He is extremely thorough and although he can be hard to get to at some times he will get back to you and you will not regret going with him. He is a wedding reception coordinator essentially «for free» and his servers are very professional. He provides excellent advise and his prices are extremely reasonable for what you get. His company does not charge the 20% gratuity like other competitors and you and your guests will come away with lots of complements on the food. Very professional and would recommend Skip to anyone. Thanks Skip!

Oh My GOODNESS: what a terrific find Skip and the Pampered Palate was to us.
Can’t tell the whole story here but bottom line was that my daughter and we decided, with a WEEK TO GO before the wedding, to change venues, caterer, and reception location. Our guest list was about 150. Beyond appearing to be completely unperturbed at our dilemma (giving us the impression «oh, this happens all the time’) Skip assured us he’d take care of everything and do so for a price that was still lower than anyplace we had checked previously. He did.
On the day, the food was so highly praised by our guests (and, fact is, it was superb), that I was shocked by the quantity of involuntary praises. He set the tables, manned the buffet, cleaned up afterwards. He had it all under control and, frankly, it made the reception. Couldn’t recommend him more highly.
Incidentally and obviously, since we contacted him rather last minute (and we were one of three that he was doing that day) we nevertheless found him easy to contact: I suspect he’s repaired whatever issues were plaguing him that were driving the earlier negative reviews.
Nevertheless, please God, with only one daughter, let this be the last wedding we have to plan. .. .

I hired skip to cater my wife’s birthday and what a wonderful experience at such a fair price for everything. Skip provided us an opportunity to taste all the food at his well know restaurant, Girasole, and decide what to serve our guests. Skip came over the night before the party and personally arranged the serving area, even dressing tables with flowers. What great attention to detail. His staff was rights on time the day of our event, were very friendly and made the day more enjoyable for us. We would use PPC again for our next event and highly recommend to everyone.

I just read through some of the negative reviews on here and I feel bad for those of you who chose not to go with Skip and Pampered Palate. He just catered our wedding in March and was fantastic from start to Finish! I first called him during Christmas season and he was extremely busy. I understood this fact and called him back after the new year. I didn’t expect him to call me back as its my responsibility and my wedding. He was attentive and great from that moment on! He met us in San Francisco at our venue and worked through every logistical detail since we had to flip the layout twice to accommodate the number of people we had in a small venue.
As for the food, I have yet to hear anything negative and have had so many comments about how it was the best food they ever had at a wedding. i have had two friends contact me for his info for their wedding already and do not think it will be the last. We had stuffed chicken breasts, pasta, salad, green beans, focaccia, and scallop potatoes. Not to mention 5 appetizers that our guests were raving about and said they just kept bringing more and more. Our venue did not have a kitchen so everything had to be precooked and i cant believe how well it kept up and how great it turned out. He is affordable and worth more than he charges! His staff was friendly and very helpful. Bartenders were energetic and poured great drinks.
My advice, it’s worth the effort to get a hold of him, so if you catch him at a busy time have a little patience and take responsibility and follow up with him yourself.

Skip and his crew catered our wedding in March 2013 at a location in San Francisco. First we met at his restaurant and sampled more food than I expected. The food was amazing and after sampling about 5 other places we went with PPC. The cost of the pampered Palate was significantly less than almost all of the venues in the City. Not to mention that the food was significantly better than the other places. The big thing that we liked was that Skip sat down with us and took the time to explain each dish as well as walked through a timeline and every other detail. I also enjoyed the beers.
My wife and I are easy going and asked Skip what would work best due to the logistics (its complicated). This was probably the best decision we made… we listened to him. I would say most weddings the food is average to below average. This is because its difficult to cook steak for 150 people and have it all come out medium rare. We went with a stuffed chicken dish, green beans, pasta salad, fruit, bread, asiago potatoes and maybe something else that I cant remember.
Our venue was very specific on the insurance and rules of the location and Skip went out of his way to contact the venue and make sure everything was good to go. We were in contact with him several times before the wedding and even met with him onsite to walk through the venue.
On the wedding day Skip and his crew had three hours to set up everything. Our ceremony and reception were in the same building and required moving all the chairs after the reception in order to set up additional tables (its complicated). His staff did this before I even knew it.
As for the food… I really cant say enough about how good it was. People say they don’t eat on their wedding day but I assure you I ate multiple times. Everything was absolutely amazing. During the wedding I had at least 20 people compliment the food and Skip himself. Since then, everyone i have spoken to about the wedding complimented the food and many said it was the best wedding food ever. I mention complimenting Skip because, at the wedding he went around and dismissed each table after explaining what was served which, multiple guests complimented on.
The only downside is that during the wedding Skip asked what I wanted to do with the leftovers. He packaged them up for us to take or to give to family members but I forgot them in the fridge! I was hungover and bummed about that the next day but… the good news is that my wife and I are planning on stopping by his restaurant the next time we are in town and for our anniversary.
As for some of the negative comments on getting a hold of him… I didn’t find this to be a problem. A lot of people (brides) think that their wedding is the only thing these people are doing and expect the vendors to bend over backwords before they have even paid a dollar or signed a contract. Maybe we didn’t have this problem because when we met with skip we signed the contract that night.

As for the negative reviews here, I get it. It has some truth to it. Skip can be hard to get a hold of, but I’m pretty sure its because he has so much clients who wants him and so little time. Just understand that he’s a busy man.
From my first phone call with Skip to the menu tasting, and all the way to the end of our wedding, I’ve been nothing but impressed with Pampered Palate. We got the buffet package with the 3 hors d’oeuvres option and the BYOB. Our guests kept raving about how great the salad was. One even said, if I had a extra bottle with me, I would so take some of that dressing home. The baja stuffed chicken, the Absolut! penne rustica and salmon with lemon beurre blanc sauce were also a hit. And not to mention the beautifully decorated fruit display.
Not only is their food delicious, but the catering staff is soooo awesome and accommodating. Skip’s daughter, Nicole was there until the end of our event and they were so nice for helping me and my family clean up the rest of our stuff. They knew how exhausted we were and having them help us meant a lot. We had a bartender during our reception and they were so cool with everyone and generous with the amount of alcohol they would give to the guests. And they were really patient with the amount of drunks around them.
The best part about hiring Pampered Palate as your caterer is the price. They are totally affordable. There were about 10+ people that couldn’t make it to our wedding, but we had paid for the per head charge already. It doesn’t hurt so much on the pockets when this happens because we got to take the leftover food home. My family and I got to enjoy the rest of the leftovers for 3 days. I’m Filipino and we don’t like to waste food, so it was great that we got to do this. I definitely recommend them to cater your next big event cuz they are so worth it.

Skip and his crew catered our wedding. They did a wonderful job. I highly recommend their services.

Absolutely amazing caterer! Five stars is not enough!!! We recently used Skip and Pampered Palate for our caterer at our wedding on June 2, 2012. I can not imagine the day going any more perfect, and I attribute this largely to all of the hard work, preparation, meticulous attention to detail, and pure professionalism which made the event truly elegant and beautiful from Skip and his staff.
From the start, we met with Skip about 9 months prior to our wedding. Like most couples, hundreds of questions were in our heads regarding what needed to be done for the day, and Skip was definately the one to go to to sort out what to do Skip gave us the most delicious tasting and the first meeting went on for over 2 ½ hours, by the end we had our tentative menu chosen, had gotten a list of recommended people (from cake people to dj’s) and even more Skip helped plan out how everything would go for the wedding day. His expertise and planning skills were undeniably an EXTREME help! As well, he suggested several cost saving strategies for the wedding and was truly concerned making it an very affordable and yet extremely elegant affair. After this first meeting, we met with Skip a couple more times before the big day, and were in email contact as well up until the wedding, typically getting a response within a couple hours if not immediately.
The day of the wedding, his staff was promptly at the reception location ready to set up by 1130(for a 6 o’clock reception) and the whole room was ready and fully prepared with plenty of time to go! All throughout the reception, all of the guests were raving about how beautiful everything was, what quick service there was (for 200 people there was Never a line at the bar, with there being 3 bartenders), and how fast the buffet service went (all 25 tables had gotten food within 10 minutes because of the 4 separate buffet lines moving things quickly and the extreme abundance of food and appetizers!!). As well, the professionalism was top notch, Skip went table to table explaining what was on the menu and answering any questions, and all the servers were dressed in suits. The drinks were all served in bar glasses (from glass pints to glass cups– no tacky cheap plastic party cups). The food was truly to die for– perfectly cooked and with such amazing flavor, tasting exactly what it tasted like when we had our tasting in the restaurant! Throughout the night, we were told literally hundreds of times how amazing the food tasted, asked who the caterer was, and were told how wonderful everything and everyone on his staff were.
I truly cannot say enough about Skip and his staff at pampered palate! They are all remarkable people, and will forever be connected to an image of excellence (and used again for any events) by me and my wife and all that attended our wedding. Thank you again Pampered Palate for the remarkable service which we received for our wedding reception!

Me and my fiancé have been trying to contact Skip for weeks now through phone and e-​mails. Trying to get in for a tasting/​consultation. All we have gotten were e-​mail responses about how busy he was but he has us on his calendar. Every time he said he’d get back to us he never did. There was always a big event he was attending too. The way we took this was that our 70 guest wedding wasn’t a big enough event compared to his other clients so he could continue to put us on the back burner.
As stressful as it is planning a wedding and the caterer being one of the biggest expenses, the constant lack of follow through was stacking stress on top of stress. We decided to go with another vendor and a different venue option. We cannot speak on the food but the professionalism and lack of follow through are in the pits.

Simply put, Skip and the Pampered Palate team did an amazing job with our wedding.
It started with our initial meeting six months before our wedding. We met Skip and tasted a sampling of all the possible dishes we could serve at the event. Skip was a real pro, and we felt that he was truly trying to suggest what was best for us, our guests and our budget (in fact, several times he asked his assistant how they could lower the cost!).
He helped us plan the order of things that needed to happen on our wedding day and he had a handy document template to help us get everything sorted on our end. It’s almost as though he provided an extra service (free of charge): helping us leverage his experience of weddings and how things usually happen so that we didn’t feel so lost. He also suggested ways that we could save money, which was awesome.
Leading up to the event, Skip worked with the team that did the decorations for the wedding (a separate company) to make sure everything would go well. In fact, he actually had to make an *extra* 150 mile round trip (on top of the two other 150 mile trips he had to make for our outdoor wedding in Pescadero) because he needed to coordinate the assembly of a last minute canopy due the coming rain. Amazing!
I understand that Skip does quite a few events every year, but it felt as though he put his «all» into our event specifically. I’m sure he does this with all his events (that is to say, he makes everyone feel like they are special), and so I think this is a testament to the amount of energy he puts into his weddings as a general rule. It’s a very refreshing thing to see because, being a business owner myself, it’s so rare to find someone who actually ties their own personal success with success for the customer.
On the day of our wedding, Skip delivered everything he promised — and more. The food was amazing (we had many people tell us that they loved the quality of the food and the variety of the menu), everything was professionally presented, the staff looked great and were highly professional, and Skip was there coordinating and overseeing everything.
Bottom line: Great service, great value, great food, honesty, integrity and all that comes with it. You’d be lucky to get Skip and Pampered Palate for your event.

A thousand thank you’s to Skip and everyone at Pampered Palate.
It comes with great pleasure that I post this review. We chose Skip to cater our wedding here in Dublin. Both my wife and I can’t help but rave about the quality of service and food that was provided. Skip and his staff are without a doubt the best in the business.
From the beginning he sat us down to have a sampling of his dishes. We initially preferred particular items on the menu. After he reviewed our choices he suggested some pairings which may compliment our selections. Boy was he right. Misto salad and chilled asparagus. Absolut! Pesto fusili, the asiago potatos, salmon w/​mango salsa, and the California Cordon Blu. The attendee’s of our wedding were critical foodies. Some who have spent the entire summer attending various weddings. They were all blown away saying the nothing came close to the food they had at our wedding.
The staff was great attending to every detail. Skip’s company was completely full service. From the linens (which he helped us choose in color), to the flatware, glasses, coffee, china, glasses. ALL OF IT!
We can honestly say we will be repeat customers for a long time to come. Our daughter’s 18^th birthday and graduation party will be the next even we’ll be calling Skip to do. Since the wedding two days ago, some of our guest have been inquiring where his restaurant Girasole in Pleasanton is located. Believe me we’ll be paying him a visit soon.
Our church and staff we’re blown away as well and they can’t wait to use his services for future engagements.
Choose him and don’t look back!!! Your party will no doubt be a hit!

My husband and I met with Skip when we were trying to choose a caterer for our wedding.
The three of us sat down and a waiter promptly got us water and Scoozi (YUM!) We then sampled salads, sides & main dishes (most in which I have forgotten, seeing as this was almost 2 years ago).
The food was good, his prices were fair, so what is my problem, you ask? Skip. He was very difficult to get a hold of, taking up to a week at times to respond to a simple question. During our tasting, Skip had bragged that the most weddings he’s done in one day was seven. SEVEN. That turned us off greatly. Now I know why it was so hard to get a hold of him… clearly overdoes himself, and not in a good way.
We go to Girisole every once in a while, because the food really is good. But as for a caterer, I would suggest looking elsewhere.

I have been meaning to do this for 3 years now!!!
Our wedding was on Treasure Island… in a giant building without a kitchen. Skip came to scope the property and gave us a detailed list of what would need to be rented to make our menu work for the event. He even went out of his way to contact HIS friend at classic party rental to see if their kitchen rental was cheaper than our contact at the Burlingame facility. He and his assistant were in contact with us regularly throughout the process and when the big day came, I cannot tell you how many of our guests commented on THE FOOD! They didn’t have to comment but they did. The staff was super professional and the party seemed to go off without a hitch.
We could not recommend a caterer more highly. For a guy running two restaurants and a catering business, we felt he gave us a helluva lot of attention. Hire Skip for your next party or wedding! You won’t be sorry. Oh, and go eat at his restaurants! I am still salivating for his food…
Elaine & John

Skip at the Pampered Palate is a very genuine and kind person who takes his business very seriously and puts in 100%.
We met him a year before our wedding as we were considering working together. Skip sat down with us for nearly three hours, as we tasted all of the different wedding salad, entrée and appetizer choices.
The food was delicious, especially the Jerk Salmon and Filet Mignon. It was not a difficult decision to work with Skip and neither was it difficult to choose those two entrée selections. His pear salad was also a crowd favorite.
Skip came out to the Purple Orchid (where we got married) three or four different times to spec everything out perfectly. He drew up a map of the property and showed us exactly where he would put his tents to serve us outside in the olive orchard, which is no easy feat. He also rented an outdoor oven at the last minute to ensure all the food would be piping hot when served (and he did not bother to charge us for a penny of that).
He is a perfectionist when it comes to his food and all of our guests praised him and his food.
He did such an amazing job that he has now become a preferred vendor for the Purple Orchid Inn.
Our only small point of feedback is that his staff had some trouble passing out the cake to all of the guests and somehow it was miscommunicated that we did not plan to save our top layer of cake, and as such, a few guests did not get fed any. Again, I think this is a minor detail in comparison to the beautiful and delicious meal that was served to our guests at our wedding.
We recommend him to all of our friends who will be getting married soon and also to anyone reading this.
Huge thanks, Skip for all of your hard work and to your staff as well!

I thought that the food at Pampered Palate Catering/​Girasolle Grill was very good. Skip is very knowledgeable and provided us with a lot of good information about wedding planning in general at our tasting. I also like that most items like linens, etc. are already figured into prices, and I was able to call Skip and get a rough estimate before meeting with him. However, Skip’s personality was a real turn-​off for me. He made a couple of comments about conflicts with other vendors and past employees, and he made a couple of comments that were a little inappropriate. It kind of turned me off from hiring a catering company run by a man, honestly. Skip is very busy and overworked running both the restaurant and catering company. However, I recently received an e-​mail from a new female assistant who has been hired to help Skip with the catering. My hunch is that this will help a lot!

We heard a lot of great things about Pampered Palate Catering and decided to schedule a tasting for our upcoming wedding. We met with Skip, the owner, at the restaurant (Girasole Grill) and he was able to bring out our entire planned menu. The food was incredible and Skip’s outline of how the day would go was excellent. Skip said he was a little busy at the time but he would have a full proposal within a week. A month went by and we hadn’t heard from him. After trying to contact him for two weeks by email, phone, and through friends who know Skip personally, we were finally able to hear through a friend that we were «on his to-​do list» for that day. We still did not receive a phone call. 5 months later we got an email from Dawn, a recently hired employee of Pampered Palate, asking if we still wanted to use them for our wedding. Seriously?
Despite some of the great reviews on here, we were forced to rate this caterer with 1 star. When your spending a substantial amount of money on a major aspect of your wedding, you expect the man in charge to keep an open line of communication and provide you with great service. Thanks for the tasting Skip, unfortunately, that was as far as we got with you.

James & Skip,
Thank you for everything you did for us last night. The food you provided for our annual holiday party was fantastic!!! Everyone raved about the quality of the food and the overall selection. You and your staff went above and beyond my expectations by throwing in a little holiday décor on our tables and the buffet station. Everything was perfect! Your staff was on time, friendly and professional. You guys rock! Thank you again!
~Jody

Pampered Palate makes delicious food!
I was at a luncheon today where Pampered Palate was the caterer and I was so impressed with the taste and quality of their food. They served a roasted stuffed chicken with this delicious cream scalloped potatoes. Their servers were professional and polite and I and I will definitely consider Pampered Palate for my future catering needs!