I am sharing my NEGATIVE experience with the catering services of Ciao Baby Catering owned by DeeDee Maza. I recently just had my wedding on August 28, 2010...she was hired as my caterer and we had a contract. We paid a great amount of money for her to cater for 140 people and she was all paid up one month prior to my wedding. Not only did we put trust into her being our caterer, we also turned to her for planner help. We first met with DeeDee Maza with Ciao Baby Catering and we thought she was so passionate about making couples happy and being the perfect caterer. Little did we know that was not the case. We had a contract with her and had tastings with what she was going to provide for our wedding and on the wedding day there were a handful of things that went wrong and many of the things that were listed in our contract were not reached. We paid her a great deal of money up front- Always on time and we definitely we think we overpaid for the service we got. First, the main thing was that we paid a lot of money for her to cater, we paid for 140 people and there was actually about 125 people that actually came. She ran out of food and did not have enough for 125 People. We have multiple counts of people coming up to us after the wedding and said they did not eat or their food was cold (turns out that the burners for the pasta station she was providing ran out of gas). We have come across our guests stating that they saw DeeDee (owner) yelling at the server carving the meat at the meat station that he was slicing the meat too thick. There was suppose to be 4 prime ribs to be sliced and there was only 1 for the whole evening. We got done eating at our sweetheart table and saw that the pasta station was taking quite a long time. Lance and I understood but the line was wrapped around the room, so we decided to make our rounds to say hi to every table. After an hour and 15 minutes we returned to our table and we still had our plates sitting on the table. We then looked around and had to ask a server to take away our dishes. And we had to do that multiple times throughout the night. That was a service that should have been done by the caterer. She said that she was out monitoring the event throughout the night which was not the case. She came up to me half way through our reception stating that she was going to leave. These are just a few issues I'm bringing up...but there are a handful more.

Not only was the catering bad, I had my trust in her. So when I was overwhelmed in my planning process I turned to her to see if she had anyone that had experience in planning. And she said she had just the person that had plenty of experience. I was so excited to receive the help and introduced me to Tracy. We had to sign a contract and in that contract we paid her $1000.00 to organize the wedding day and a long list of duties she was to perform. About 3 months before the wedding I explained to DeeDee that i wasn't sure if I was even working with Tracy, she never contacted me to help plan anything. We had a couple of meetings with Tracy and DeeDee but other than that nothing was productive. 1 month before the wedding she brought in this girl name Autumn taking the place of Tracy. She showed up for the rehearsal and the day of the event. But instead of her doing the tasks that were provided in the contract, my sisters' who were in my wedding party were running around doing the tasks she was supposed to be doing. There was nothing in the contract that she completed. To me that is breaking our contract.

So my husband and I tried to resolve the situation. We didn't want to ever ruin DeeDee Maza or Ciao Baby's Reputation but we felt that we did not get acceptable service and we overpaid for what was promised. So we called a meeting and she confirmed. We went to meet her and she couldn't make it so we had a phone conversation. She got defensive and denied everything. She didn't want to make us as clients happy or reconcile the problem. We felt that we should be refunded the $1000.00 for the planner that did not meet any of the contract agreement, and half of what we paid for the catering services which Ciao Baby did not provide the service, food, and professionalism we were guaranteed. At this point we just want other couples to know about our negative experience Ciao Baby Catering put us through, and hopefully other couples don't experience that. Planning a wedding is so expensive as it is and people paying good money should not be scammed.

From my personal experience, I WOULD NOT use her services again. Ciao Baby Catering and Dee Dee Maza also has NEGATIVE REVIEWS with the Stone house. She was head caterer there and other reviews from that venue, were not good either. Dee Dee is planning to open up her own venue in Tempe, AZ and cater there... with the services I got for my wedding I would never go near that place.