Lancer Catering

Lancer is the only choice for a caterer for most venues owned by the state. We had to use them for our wedding held at the zoo. The food was fine, but the customer service was HORRENDOUS to say the least. Over the course of 10 months, we had 3 different banquet managers. The first two was fine, the last one only basically got in touch to send out either A) Incorrect Information or B) Invoices or to ask for payment. And forget it if you send an email, they want to make sure that they cover their tracks so 90% of things are only handled via phone, several days later. The last banquet manager started 3 months prior to our wedding. When I had inquired about certain things I had discussed with the past banquet managers, she seemed confused and passed on the wrong information. Had it not been for our contact at the zoo (she did not work for Lancer), I would have been one very irate bride come the day of the wedding. A week before the wedding, I was delivering our items to our zoo contact when I received a call from our Banquet Manager demanding payment, after I had been playing phone tag with her for several days since they originally wanted me to email or fax CC information, and we were not sending CC information via email and neither of us had access to a fax machine. Who faxes things nowadays anyways?
For the reception, the VERY first thing I noticed was that the draping had not been wrapped all the way around the room and you can see in all of my pictures by that back wall where the cake was the name of the different restaurants in the cafeteria. We had told a few select guests that there were a few extra meals ordered for guests who couldn’t make it. We told them to simply ask one of the waiters since it was plated, and we paid for the plates. We knew we couldn’t take them home, but wanted to be sure they were eaten. When they asked the waiter (who we were told were college kids) he said no. He didn’t even go ask if this was possible. Their excuse was the waiter was just a college kid who shouldn’t have taken it upon himself to answer the question. We asked to be refunded for the extra meals since they were not given to our guests and our banquet manager said that we had gone over in our hosted beverages and well one was served to our DJ. We ordered a meal for our DJ, so where did our extra meals go? When I stated that I know for a FACT that some people paid cash for the beverages towards the end of the night including my in-​laws and why was our day of contact not asked if beverages should be added since we hosted wine, beer and soda she said she had to research this. Note: The fact we supposedly went over in our beverage allotment did NOT come up once until I asked for reimbursement on our extra plates that were not served to guests. At this time, we also inquired why our guests were served fountain pop. When we had inquired why pop was so expensive during one of our first meetings, it was stated to us that fountain pop was IMPOSSIBLE to do since it would be a logistics nightmare for bar set up, hence why the pop was a higher cost. We never received an answer on this. We were told that the director would get back to us, and its been almost 2 months since our event and we have heard NOTHING.
Moral of the story: We paid a lot for okay catering with horrible business ethics and customer service skills. I would never recommend them to anyone, unless of course you like to inflict a lot of extra stress upon yourself.

We had no choice but to go with Lancer since they were the sole caterers for our venue, where we held our wedding reception. We made our requirements very clear from day 1 and they smiled and asked us not to worry as they would take care of everything.
Our first tasting was cancelled. For our second tasting, the food was subpar. The chef was honest and said he had never prepared Indian food while the Lancer staff lied to our faces saying he was just being modest. From the taste of the food, it was clear that the Chef was telling the truth. We provided him recipes for the third tasting and he still didn’t get it right. At this point Lancer agreed to work with a third party of our choice and allow us to bring the main course while they were to provide us with the appetizers.
One week before the event, they said they couldn’t deal with out vendor and we had to do all the following up. In the process, more senior members of Lancer got involved and had all heir facts confused. They charged a 100% markup to the third party food without doing any work, they decided to cut out one appetizer without consulting us, they refused to get back to us with a final amount of the food and beverage minimum that would be available for the beverages.
The owner of the company, Glen kept saying this is not working out and threatened us with pulling the plug a day before the event. None of their staff would respond to our emails or our phone calls. When we complained to the venue, it upset Lancer and the owner was behaving like a sullen teenager. This is after changing their policy last minute to demand their payment via money order in spite of having our credit card on file. We saw three different invoices and Lancer said they don’t know how there were three versions. The owner made it seem like it was too much effort for him to get 100% markup without lifting a finger. They kept getting their math wrong. They double charged the service charge.
After dealing with the owner, I have no complaints about the staff. If the owner can’t behave like a professional, there’s no hope from the employees.
If you decide on a venue that is catered by Lancer, consider yourself forewarned.
If I could award negative stars, I would!

Never would I have thought a President of a company throw a tantrum in front of his clients. President /​owner of the company has no idea what deals his sales people are making and no customer service… he threw a copy of an invoice across the table to us and said basically I just need your money. All we were there to do was ask how much remaining money we had to put towards an open bar and NO ONE at the company headquarter could tell us. We personally went onsite to their offices and had a talk with them 2 times.
Horrible management and service. I wouldn’t trust them with any event and have no respect for a man who throws an invoice across the table to me when I am paying them so much money.
He actually called his sales agent on speaker phone and said I don’t know why we did this for them… basically he was bad mouthing us right to our face.
It was one day before our event and we were dealing with this company who is highly unorganized.
All the places that have Lancer Catering as their main vendor are really suffering because I’m sure we’re not the first people to get this bad service… I would NEVER recommend any of those venues to my friends or family if Lancer is the catering company.
Poor management, horrible food (Claimed they could cook Indian food, when we went to taste the food the chef said he couldn’t find cottage cheese so he didn’t make the dish we wanted to taste), and worst of all the owner was a completly unprofessional individual who has no respect for anyone.

We hired Lancer Catering to handle my daughter’s wedding. I think, no, would not use them again.
— My daughter worked with them on initial arrangements and contracting. Though they knew I would be paying for everything, they had her sign a contract before I had a chance to review it. NOT COOL! They NEVER checked with me about budgets, payments, etc. I consider this to be very unprofessional. Of course, you plan everything with the bride, it’s «her day». But, at the end of the day… who is paying the bill, and making your payroll? Once I got thought this rather large frustration with them, and reviewed the pricing… we were able to move forward. Didn’t have much chance, as they got her signature, and she clearly did NOT understand what she was committing to. But, I have also come to find out, this is common practice in the wedding industry, and explains why things are so over priced.
— Okay, so, you spend a pile of money to throw a big party. The menu sounds great, decorations are cool, etc…
— Well, the hors d’oeuvres were decent. Actually, better than expected. So, it started off nicely. They really were good.
— Service? Service was slow… I’ve been to a number of weddings, and our party was not large — ~90 people. Overall, just very unimpressed.
— Main course? no. throw the different meat types on same setting of potatoes and asparagus? This was like bad institutional food. I had the fish, it was expensive per plate, and lousy. Soggy batter, on overcooked pieces of fish, and bland. The guests who had the chicken were not impressed with it, either. It was also overcooked, and dry. people, can you not cook chicken without ruining it?
Take away message: We paid a lot for a professional catering service that delivered poor food and had, what I feel to be, questionable business contracting. The one thing they were VERY good about was invoicing and collecting payments… at least they were responsive to my requests for invoices

Our experience with Lancer was generally good. We had our wedding reception at the Science Museum of Minnesota and Lancer is the only catering option…
On the plus side, their food is pretty tasty and they work with Buttercream Cakes, who are excellent.
On the down side, they have exorbitant corkage fees and honestly terrible house wines. Kinda puts you in a tough spot. The only other issue was that our rep was utterly terrible at email. She was fine on the phone if you could get a hold of her, but it would be nice if she could use other communication methods as well.

Lancer catered my wedding reception at the Science Museum of Minnesota last month. We offered three meal options: filet, walleye and a vegetarian risotto. I don’t eat meat, but by all accounts the filet was delicious. I did sample the risotto and thought it was also quite good for banquet food. I had the walleye though, and was terribly disappointed. It came out as a giant battered and fried slab that took up fully half the plate and was not nearly as good or as well presented as what we had sampled at our tasting.
The day-​of service provided by Lancer was certainly decent. Everything ran pretty smoothly and the waitstaff were courteous, However, my husband and I had folded 1,000 paper cranes for table decorations as a way of incorporating some Japanese culture into our wedding (we met in Japan, both speak Japanese, and his mother is from Tokyo), and had planned to collect and do something with them after the wedding. Without consulting anyone, the staff threw almost all of them away when they cleared the tables except for the few that my mother and friends were able to salvage when they realized what was happening. It was certainly not the end of the world, but I remain upset that no one from Lancer bothered to ask and all of our hard work ended up in the trash.
Lancer’s house wines are swill, and their corkage fee and markups on other wines are exorbitant, but I imagine that that’s pretty standard in the catering industry. They were cool about supplementing their standard bottled beer selections with Leinie’s Berry Weiss, which I love, and although I didn’t ever make it over to the bar, people reported that the cocktail selection and the bartenders were good.
The only organizational snafu on the day of the wedding was that there were no signs in the lobby indicating to guests where they should go, so when people came up from the parking garage, there was a lot of milling around in the Science Museum lobby before people realized that the reception was on the second floor. My husband and I, who were taking pics in the lobby at the time, actually had to explain how to find it to a bunch of the guests.
The catering manager who we worked with was perfectly nice in person and reasonable on the phone, but between the time change (we live in AZ) and our busy schedules we ended up having to do most of our communicating with her by e-​mail and I have yet to meet someone in the service industry who was quite so terrible at it. Many of my mails went unanswered for weeks at a time («lost in her inbox»). Her responses were fairly unclear and didn’t usually address all of the questions I’d asked. I realize that e-​mail skill is largely generational, but I imagine that the majority of people getting married these days are around my age (27) and I can’t imagine that we’re the first people to run into this problem. In short, Lancer really needs to improve this aspect of their service and join the 21^st century!
Issues aside, Lancer is the only catering option for the Science Museum which was AMAZING, and I wouldn’t say our issues were severe enough to make us wish that we’d chosen a different venue. I think that with a little more effort to be communicative and a little more evidence of organizational ability, I would have been completely satisfied. On the positive side — Lancer offers parking vouchers and free admission to the museum, both nice perks. They also partner with Buttercream for wedding cakes and those folks do an amazing job.
I would give them two and a half stars if I could, but I can’t justify a three (A-​OK) rating.

Lancer catered my wedding reception at the Como Zoo & Conservatory. I didnt really have a choice since they have a contract with the zoo but I wasn’t disappointed at all.
I’m a little biased as to the service of the waitstaff since, being the bride, I got my drinks and meals before everybody else in the room. So… good job? The waiter did offer to get me both types of wine since I wanted to taste the other one, which I thought was helpful of him.
The food was DELICIOUS. We had grilled walleye with wild rice (how very Minnesotan, right?) and chicken with mash. I still hear about how perfectly cooked and wonderful and blah blah blah it was to this day. Food is mostly what people remember about weddings anyway, so Lancer is definitely a great choice. I recently went to a wedding and my mother-​in-​law said the food was just as good as my wedding – and when we looked it was also Lancer Catering. That says it right there.
I had the vegetarian polenta dish and it was honestly (possibly thanks to my 2 glasses of wine) the best polenta I had in my entire life. It was smothered with wild mushrooms and sun dried tomatoes. Other vegetarians agreed with me though, so I would wholeheartedly believe us.
Dont drink their house wine – it’s totally disgusting. After the pre-​tasting they gave me a list of specialty wines they order for events so I hauled it down to Surdyk’s to choose something else. Seriously dont drink it.
They did a fantastic job though. My only complaint is that the people setting up tables in the reception hall were a bit rude. The ceremony got rained out and moved inside so when there was no place to go, we all gathered in the hall. The people setting up were grumpy and just kept shuffling us around the room. It would have been simple to actually speak to us and tell us where we SHOULD go instead of physically mowing us down when we got in the way.
Whatever…the polenta was incredible.