Experience could not have been worse
Let me be clear in saying that I do not give a 1 star review to The Lime Truck lightly. Let me also say that my fiancé and I tirelessly researched our catering options and ultimately landed on TLT due to their solid reviews, the style of food, and the passion that our catering contact, Jay, exuded about The Lime Truck - how we'd be thrilled with their services should we choose to proceed. We went ahead and secured our place with The Lime Truck back in January 2018 for our 9/15/2018 wedding in Joshua tree which has now come & gone. I'll give a detailed account of what happened below - but as a high level summary, we would HIGHLY SUGGEST NOT BOOKING THEM FOR YOUR WEDDING. Our food service was a disaster.
We thought we'd have the best wedding food of all time and couldn't wait for our guests to try our selected menu -- salads and tacos along with pico de gallo and chips, along with several delicious passed appetizers at cocktail hour. Unfortunately, some of our guests never even got to try all of our food.
Throughout the course of the 9 or so months leading up to the wedding, I tasted the flood at TLT Food in Westwood twice, exchanged probably 100 emails with our catering coordinator at The Lime Truck, and had no less than 5 or 6 calls with The Lime Truck team and my wedding planner. These calls were to discuss the timing of dinner, to ensure we had an appropriate menu, to talk through the execution of our desired menu served family style and to ensure that our guests with allergies were properly accounted for. We were incredibly clear, both over the phone and in writing, about all relevant details. The plan was that the evening would kick off with four unlimited apps tray passed during cocktail hour. Soon after, dinner would be served. Leading with fresh chips & pico, our dinner would follow the set menu we selected concluding with time for guests to go up to the truck for seconds of any of the dishes that they wanted to try more of. The truck would then close by 8:00 PM.
Throughout our calls, we were assured constantly that this was TLT's specialty. The Lime Truck team are experts at these events and their execution of our family style dinner would be flawless. That the food would be freshly made and served in a timely fashion. They made us feel a bit overbearing for wanting to discuss/confirm the details so many times.
It felt like things were starting to go off the rails in the two weeks leading up to wedding. We had a call to talk logistics and the truck manager dropped the call halfway through. We were assured that our messages would be passed to him, but seems that never happened and Daniel never once followed up directly. We had 11 guest with food allergies so this was a significant concern for us. Rather than coming up with a plan to address, my planner had to send a plan to The Lime Truck team. The CEO was even CCed on some of these emails!
Come the day of the wedding, TLT decided to send our food truck with HALF OF THE SCHEDULED STAFF! Insane considering how far in advance we booked. How could they not properly staff up for a wedding of 125? The result of this understaffing was maybe three trays of passed apps the entire cocktail hour (how embarrassing). Followed by EMPTY plates until about 8:00 PM when our guests finally started to get their food. The salad was completely dry - it looked like someone simply threw bagged lettuce on a plate. So much for "waldorf" - there were grapes just randomly thrown in. It was truly terrible. The chimichurri noodles were bland. Most tables did not receive pico de gallo with their chips and those that did got a bowl for 10 people that was the size of a ketchup cup. By the end of the night, some people had not even received every menu item.
Aside from not being fed, this meant that my amazing wedding planner and our awesome DJ had to basically scrap our original timeline to make up for the fact that guests had no food to eat. Two of the servers that WE HIRED had to jump in the truck to help prep food. We had to pay servers overtime to stay and help. We had to order $300 worth of pizza for our vendors who were never able to eat the food that the truck prepared because the guests hadn't even been fed. We were also told that the truck would have a fun lime green canvas cover with the name of the truck on it - instead it was a plain black & white truck that pulled up.
My parents sent an apology email to our guests after the wedding because it was just truly embarrassing and completely abysmal service. We had extensive conversations afterwards with the CEO, who was incredibly apologetic, but honestly, your wedding day comes once in your life and what they did was inexcusable. Thus, I write this 1 star review to all couples considering The Lime Truck because honestly, even if they get it right 90% of the time, no one should have to endure the stress of not feeding their wedding guests -- guests who, by the way, in our situation travelled to Joshua Tree from places around the world!