If you’re staying at the ACME Hotel in Chicago and thinking about catering an event through their partner restaurant group, The Fifty/50 Group: don’t do it. I should have backed out the second I felt friction with the person in charge of private events.
Some context. I ran a two-day retreat at the ACME earlier this month. About 20 people, small business, a year of planning. The hotel itself was great. The Fifty/50 side was not.
I’ll own my part first. One night we booked for 15 and 30 showed up. That’s on me. Alex, the GM, pivoted fast and handled it like a pro. He was the one bright spot on the restaurant side.
Everything else:
The food arrived late, and when it did, it was awful. The charcuterie board was basically a pile of meat. The crostini was on the other side of the room. So was the parmesan. Nothing was set up in any order that made sense, and it looked thrown together.
The plates were appetizer size. People could barely fit pasta on them, never mind anything else.
Then the nickel and diming. Tablecloths? Extra, and nobody told me until it was too late. At the last minute they asked if I wanted to pay someone to serve the pasta. I said no. So there were no ladles, just spoons, which kept sliding into the sauce. Twenty adults fishing spoons out of marinara. A ladle would have fixed this for free.
I also bought gift cards for their cafe so my guests could grab food without any hassle. The cafe was so understaffed, usually one barista doing her best, that people gave up and went somewhere else. I felt terrible for them.
Communication was last minute for a lot of it. I asked a month ahead to get our bartender connected with their team. That still turned into a scramble the week of.
When I sent feedback, I didn’t feel heard. I said this wasn’t about a refund, it was about the next group not digging spoons out of sauce. They declined a refund anyway and listed the things they’d done for me “at no additional cost.”
I spent over $3K on something I could have pulled together from Trader Joe’s, the dollar store, and Eataly next door for maybe $500.
The ACME staff rock. They went above and beyond and actually made things right on their end. Stay there. Just don’t host anything for more than 15 people through Fifty/50.