The Highland Park Country Club

Only recommend their catering services

I booked my wedding with CBM at their newly renovated venue, Highland Park Country Club, and my overall takeaway is that CBM is a phenomenal catering company but has a ton of room for improvement when it comes to being an event host/wedding venue. If I could go back in time, I would have booked my wedding at a different venue and only hired CBM for catering Pros: 1. I cannot express enough how great CBM’s food is – many guests told us that it was the best meal they’ve ever had at a wedding 2. The inside of the venue looks great so far 3. Tiffany was our coordinator, and she did a great job at managing delays with the venue, sharing recommendations, etc 4. Tiffany and the day-of staff were kind and helpful Cons: 1. Poor communication. For example, we were told both in-person and via email that there would be a built-in-bar, which was very important to us prior to signing. A month before my wedding, we received an email that there wouldn’t be a built-in-bar and that our bar was always going to be tables with linens. When we explained to the COO, Jeff Ware, that we had emails telling us there’d be a built-in-bar, he got defensive and said he and his staff would not engage in any more conversation about the bar set up. We ended up having to pay 2.3K for bar rentals, which CBM did not help cover at all 2. We didn’t have an adequate bar set up for cocktail hour. We firmly expressed that it was important for us to not have long lines, and CBM insisted four bartenders behind a 12’ bar would work for 175 guests and they’d have servers passing out cocktails. They only passed out 1-2 trays, and there were massive lines 3. We did a final walkthrough of the venue two weeks before wedding – we arrived to a massive construction site throughout the entrance and parking lot which was sadly the walkway to ceremony and visible to where the ceremony was being held. It was an eyesore, and there was nothing we could do by the time we learned of it. And no, we were never informed of this construction even though it had been there for over a week prior to walkthrough 4. My uncle catered ice cream at my wedding, and CBM told us they would provide spoons for this. When it was time to serve ice cream, the staff told my uncle that they had no idea they were supposed to provide spoons. Luckily, my uncle had plastic spoons in his truck, but they weren’t ideal for this type of event and easily broke 5. The leftover cake was supposed to be packed up for us to take home, but we never received it. There was a lot leftover, and neither my husband or I got to try it 6. While Tiffany is great at her job, she has a lot of responsibilities on the wedding day, making it humanly impossible for her to fulfill a wedding coordinator role. I mention this because CBM insisted we didn’t need a day-of coordinator when we signed. In retrospect, we 100% needed one We relayed the above to the owners of CBM a few days after wedding. They only responded to the construction, stating that they spent a lot of time weeding the walkway for us - no response to any of the other letdowns listed above. CBM and Village of HP seem to be in a partnership; however, in resolutions or discussions to attempt resolutions, the buck always passed on was that CBM’s hands were tied. While we realize that frustrations, delays, etc. are part of a large construction project, but it was us, the clients, who got the short end of stick and had to pay more to resolve the last-minute hurdles thrown our way