Alex Barnett, co-owner of a local caterer Cut and Taste, has a clear vision for the company.
“We want to be known as the best caterer in Las Vegas,” he said. “We want to have our niche doing large-volume events — five, 10, 15,000 people — and just have those events be memorable for people.”
Whether they preside over the best catering service in the valley might be up for debate, but there’s no debating the company’s recent rise.
Founded eight years ago, Cut and Taste, which has about a dozen full-time employees, is the brainchild of Adam Pusateri and Las Vegas native Jeremy Jordan.
Barnett, Pusateri and Jordan, all age 31, went to school together at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, graduating in 2008.
“Jeremy and Adam were roommates,” said Barnett, who also has a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management from UNLV. “I was just a guy who would hang out.”
After culinary school, Jordan, who also has an undergraduate degree from UNLV, returned to Southern Nevada to pursue his catering aspirations. Pusateri moved here in 2011.
Both can recall the company’s early days, when they also had to work full-time jobs on the Strip to make ends meet. Pusateri ran the overnight kitchen at the Aria; Jordan was a manager at Mandalay Bay.
“I think those first two years, when it was Jeremy and Adam, were the biggest grind,” Barnett said.
Cut and Taste started to become a full-time commitment in 2014 when it secured a contract at World Market Center and also began working events at the Keep Memory Alive Event Center in downtown. It also had company offices at the center.
“Once we got World Market Center, we started to realize that a lot of our business was going to come to us,” Jordan said. “Working in restaurants in tough. With this, you’re still able to have your food creativity, but it’s just in a different setting.”
Operating a company in Las Vegas comes with many opportunities, which have helped the company in its growth.
“Running a catering company is different in Las Vegas than it is anywhere else,” Barnett said. “There’s so much need for catering here, there’s not a big need for advertising. There are a lot of caterers here, but we’d say there’s probably three-to-five that really have it together, that we consider our competition.”
In Las Vegas, Jordan said, you get points for style, along with quality of your product. That’s why one of the events they cater has the option to include chef demonstrations, a meat and cheese wall (a spinoff of the meat and cheese board), and bread hanging stations (imagine pretzels dangling from a copper frame like sausages might in an old meat shop).
“It seems like everyone who wants to throw a party here wants to do the coolest, most different thing,” Jordan said. “We’re always creating and coming up with different food stations and linking up with local builders to design these displays.”
With their business growing, and with a recent change in ownership at World Market Center, they bought an 8,600-square-foot industrial building just south of McCarran International Airport on East Pama Lane for $1.3 million earlier this year.
Improvements and specifications for the building, which include a second-floor office space buildout, are expected to be done later this month.
The work can’t be done soon enough, Barnett said, because October is one of the busiest months of the year on the Las Vegas catering calendar.
Being busy, though, isn’t anything new. In January, Cut and Taste was responsible for nearly 250 different events during a seven-day period, Barnett said. An event, he said, could be anything from boxed lunch service for a dozen people to something for a few thousand people.
“We were just figuring it out as we went,” Barnett said. “We went from a company whose largest event was probably around 2,000 people to doing an event for 17,000 Cisco Systems employees. Things are going really well.”