Home > Categories > Food > Caterers > Just Essence review
Just Essence are specialist caterers for corporate functions, weddings, funerals and memorials, anniversaries, birthdays, cocktail parties, working lunches, conferences, venue hire and special occasions. They have a wide range of menu options available to suit all budgets and event requirements.
http://www.justessence.co.nz
Product reviews...
My husband and I got married in February of 2016 and as our reception venue was a sports club it didn't have a restaurant or anything attached to it that we could use for feeding our guests. And so the hunt for a caterer started. Using local bridal pages I was able to get a few recommendations and contacted two or three of them. Just Essence was very quick to reply to our initial emails, and as we emailed through all of our questions they didn't seem to mind that we were asking so much! After all, we wanted to make sure they were going to be right for us.
As we planned our menu we found that Just Essence were very accommodating. On their website they list menus that have set prices for certain numbers of dishes. We picked one of these and began basing our menu around it, although found that they were very flexible and if one of their 'set' menu options didn't suit we could choose what we wanted and they would price it for us. They had such a wide range of options available it was hard to choose.
One important factor for us is that we were going to have a few children at our reception. Our initial plan was to have our speeches first, then eat afterwards. This meant that we would have hungry children waiting to be fed. Just Essence offered to get some cherios and serve them to the children just as the speeches were starting so that they would have something to keep them occupied and be able to hang out a little longer to dinner. We didn't end up needing to do this as we decided to eat first before speeches, but it was still fantastic they offered to do this, especially because the children this was for were free because of their ages.
On the night Kylie made everything so easy for us. We arrived from having our photos taken to all of our food on the serving tables ready to go. Kylie kept the lids on and everything nice and warm until we were ready to eat. Everything was well laid out with big bowls of each salad, vegetable and meat option and if asked Kylie was able to tell us what was in each food item.
The one thing my husband was happy about was the fact that as part of our package we got a desert tower. What a fantastic way to do desert at a wedding! We got to pick four or five different things off a big list and they were all presented as bite sized pieces. Some people chose to get a bowl and fill it with a few things, other guests just had a little bite as the night went on. It was served alongside our cake and we were able to pick things that were similar to the cake types we had picked. It was fantastic and people were talking about it (and the rest of the food) for months after!
As an added service you can hire bar staff through Just Essence too. Being a sports club there was a bar but the club itself didn't provide staff to run it. We hired two staff through Just Essence and they were fantastic. They did the dishes all day, made sure everything went back where it needed and popped the left over cake in the fridge for us to collect the next day when we packed up.
All in all they made the whole experience so easy and all of the food was absolutely delicious! I highly recommend them to anyone who is planning an event that requires food.
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