City restarts search for Van Wezel caterer

A city committee in August reviewed potential catering services for the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall. The group awarded a contract to Mattison’s, which has been the venue’s food provider since 2011.

Now, the city is getting ready to start the process all over again.

That’s because at the end of August, a prospective vendor filed a formal challenge to the city’s bidding process. Tableseide Restaurant Group, which owns Louies Modern and Libby’s Cafe & Bar, alleged there were severe flaws in the process of choosing a caterer for the city-owned facility.

“Tableseide is confident ... that it would have been selected as the most responsible bidder but for the fact that the evaluation committee acted arbitrarily and capriciously during the evaluation process,” a letter from Tableseide owner Steve Seidensticker said.

Tableseide’s challenge details a series of purported violations of the city’s bidding process, including ignored tiebreaker rules, “impermissible favoritism” and insufficiently defined evaluation criteria.

Those concerns were enough to get the city to reissue a request for proposals seeking a catering service for the Van Wezel on Oct. 11. Still, though the bidding process is being rebooted, city staff doesn’t believe anything improper happened during the initial evaluations.

David Boswell, the city’s purchasing manager, said the city’s legal team believed the evaluation process was sound and that Tableseide had misinterpreted aspects of the initial request for proposals. One example was the tiebreaker process: A section of the RFP states that a business located in the city, like Tableseide, would win a tie with a business located outside the city, like Mattison’s.

Boswell said that provision only applies when an evaluation committee is reviewing written proposals — not when there is an in-person presentation involving a tasting, as there was during this process.

Despite his confidence that the bidding was properly conducted, Boswell agreed it would be fair to have a do-over if vendors thought the rules were unclear or unfairly applied.

“Other vendors felt the same way,” Boswell said. “We felt it’d probably be in everybody’s best interest just to clarify and reissue it.”

New proposals for catering at the Van Wezel are due to the city by 2:30 p.m. Nov. 8. The city’s contract with Mattison’s expires in February.