Dinner for a hundred, cooked like dinner for eight.
Seasonal Montana catering for weddings, gatherings and the kind of evening people talk about afterward. Small enough that the person who plans your menu is the person who cooks it.
- $28 to $120Per guest, depending entirely on how you want it served. The whole range is published.
- Since 2016Roughly forty events a year, which is the number we can cook properly.
- One kitchenNo second crew you have never met turning up on the day.
We would rather cook forty good dinners than a hundred adequate ones.
Hollowtop is a small kitchen. That is a limit and we treat it as one: we book about forty events a year and turn down more than we take, mostly in July and August when three Saturdays get asked for at once.
What you get in exchange is that the person who writes your menu is standing at the pass on the night, and nothing arrives in a van from a kitchen nobody showed you.
- Menus are a starting point, not a catalogThe three on the menus page are what we are cooking this season. Almost every event changes something, and that is expected rather than an upcharge.
- We cook to the season and the valleyFlathead cherries in July, huckleberries when the pickers deliver, lamb and lentils from east of the divide. If something is not good that week it comes off the menu.
- Allergen work is prep, not a garnish swapSeparate boards, separate oil, separate hands. Tell us at the tasting and it is built into the plan rather than handled on the night.
Late summer, served family style
One of three seasonal menus. Every one of them is a starting point you are meant to change.
The Gallatin
Late summer, family style, served on platters to the table
To start
- Smoked trout rilletterye crisp, pickled shallot, dill
- Honey and chevre tartletthyme, black pepper, local honey
- Blistered shishito pepperssesame, flake salt, lemon
The table
- Slow roast pork shouldercider, mustard seed, charred onion
- Grilled flat iron steakchimichurri, cracked pepper, finished over coals
- Squash and sage cannellonibrown butter, hazelnut, sage. Vegetarian, and not an afterthought
Alongside
- Farro with Flathead cherriesmint, sheep's milk cheese, red wine vinegar
- Roast carrotsharissa yogurt, dill, toasted seed
- Sourdough and cultured butterbaked the morning of
To finish
- Huckleberry cornmeal cakecreme fraiche, when the pickers deliver
- Chocolate pot de cremeolive oil, sea salt
Family style, from $62 a guest. Two more seasonal menus, and what changes the number, are on the menus page.
Four kinds of evening
Different enough that they are priced and staffed differently, so each one has its own page section rather than a line in a list.
-
Weddings and receptions
From $62 a guestThe bulk of what we do, mostly June through September, in barns, on ranches and in back gardens. Usually buffet or family style, occasionally plated. We handle the kitchen, the service team and the timeline, and work alongside your planner if you have one.
What a wedding involves -
Corporate and retreats
From $28 a guestBoard dinners, offsites, and the multi day retreats that come through Bozeman and Big Sky. Often three meals a day for four days, which is a logistics problem more than a cooking one, and we would rather quote it that way.
How retreat catering works -
Private dinners
From $95 a guestEight to twenty four people, in your kitchen, cooked in front of you. The most fun thing we do and the least like the rest of it. Usually a set menu of five or six courses with wine handled by you.
Private dinners at home -
Memorials and gatherings
From $28 a guestOften booked in under a week, which we hold room for. No tasting, no long planning call, and a menu we can put together from one phone conversation. We will not sell you anything extra on that call.
Catering a memorial
Nobody can quote a caterer from a web page, and pretending otherwise wastes your afternoon.
The number depends on how you want the food served, how many people, what protein, how far out of town, and which Saturday. That is genuinely true and it is also the excuse every caterer uses for publishing nothing at all.
So we publish the ranges, the minimums, the eight things that actually move the number, and one fully itemized real world example with the arithmetic shown. You should be able to work out roughly what your evening costs before you ever speak to us.
A worked example, in full on the pricing page.
120 guests, buffet, a Saturday in July at a barn twenty minutes out of town. Food, passed appetizers, seven staff for six hours, a mobile kitchen because the venue has none, and a twenty percent service charge.
$13,740, which is $114.50 a guest. Rentals, bar, flowers and cake are not in that number, and we say what they usually run.
Four steps, and a tasting in the middle
Check the date
One message with a date, a rough headcount and a venue. We answer within a day, and we say no quickly when we are already booked rather than leaving you waiting.
A real estimate
Ranges become a number. Itemized, with the service charge and the things we do not cover written down rather than implied.
Tasting
For weddings and private dinners, four to six months out. You taste the actual menu, change what you want changed, and we cook the revised version.
The evening
We arrive early, cook on site wherever there is a kitchen, serve, and leave the space cleaner than we found it. Final headcount is due ten days before.
Tell us the date and roughly how many
That is enough for us to say whether we are free and what it would likely cost. No tasting fee to ask, and no follow up if the answer is no.