by Kristen Wile

Best Impressions Catering will take the last orders for its popular meal delivery service Table & Twine this week. According to Melissa Sutherland, the brand’s chief operating officer, the catering operations at Best Impressions have grown to the point where they would need to make significant infrastructure changes to continue doing both businesses. The company made the decision to focus on its catering operations.

“Our core is catering,” she says. “Because of the growth that we’ve had with catering — including the adding of venues with The Revelry and others — we had to take a step back and say, you know we’ve got to really concentrate on the core of catering.”

Best Impressions is the caterer at venues across Charlotte, including The Bechtler Museum, The Fillmore, and The Van Landingham Estate, among others. Table & Twine made its debut during the pandemic, providing family-style and individual meals across the city. Even after the pandemic, busy families continued to order both weeknight meals and celebratory ones, such as a special Masters brunch with egg salad and pimento cheese sandwiches.  

“We started because of COVID, but that’s not why we kept going,” Sutherland says. “We kept going because it was and it still is something that people want — it’s so convenient; it’s good food; no preservatives; good fresh, local food that I think people have enjoyed. The number of emails that we’ve received from our customers about how disappointed they are that we’re not going to be doing this anymore is just unreal.”

While Best Impressions plans to end operations of Table & Twine on Aug. 14, Sutherland says they hope the brand will live on with a new owner. With a multi-million dollar revenue number from its Charlotte, Charleston, and Raleigh sales and an existing customer list of around 5,000, the business would be a turnkey one for someone who has the space to manage it.

“I’ve been in conversation with a couple of different companies, the key there is that you need a commissary — you’ve gotta have a kitchen somewhere to actually cook the food,” she says. “The operational side of it — you know, packaging and delivery — that piece of it is pretty easy to pick up and move somewhere.”