A small kitchen in Bozeman that cooks about forty events a year.
Hollowtop is named after the mountain at the south end of the Tobacco Roots, which is where the idea got talked about on a long walk in 2015.
Marta runs the kitchen. Reid runs everything that is not the kitchen.
Marta cooked in restaurants for eleven years, the last four as a sous chef, and got tired of never seeing who ate the food. Catering fixed that. Reid handles the estimates, the timelines, the rental orders and the six emails a week that begin "quick question about the linens".
Between them and a service team of six or seven regulars, that is the whole company. There is no second crew and no franchise kitchen. If you book us, you get us.
- Cooking here since 2016Roughly forty events a year, which is the number two people can do properly and the reason we say no to some Saturdays.
- Licensed and insuredCommercial kitchen, current inspection, and a certificate of insurance we will send to your venue directly. Most venues ask, and we would rather it arrive before they do.
- The same service team every timeSix or seven people who have worked together for years. Not a staffing agency, and not a different set of faces at your event than at your tasting.
Close where it is better, honest where it is not
Plenty of what we cook comes from within a couple of hours: beef and lamb from the valley, lentils and barley from east of the divide, honey, Flathead cherries in July, huckleberries when the pickers deliver.
Plenty of it does not. Citrus, olive oil, chocolate, coffee and most of what makes food taste of something do not grow in Montana. We are not going to write "hyper local" on a menu built partly on lemons from California. Local where it makes the dish better, and good wherever it comes from otherwise.
We are not the right caterer for an event of four hundred, a wedding that needs three service styles at once, or anyone who wants the cheapest number in the valley.
Two of those we simply cannot do well at our size. The third we could do and would do badly, because the way to be cheapest here is to cook the day before, reheat on site and staff it thin, and that produces exactly the catering everybody has had at a wedding and forgotten by the car park.
If any of that is what you need, say so early and we will point you at someone better suited. There are several very good larger operations in the valley and we would rather send you to one than take a booking we will both regret.
Bozeman and about an hour around it
Travel is included inside thirty miles. Past that it is $2.25 a mile, and it goes on the estimate rather than the final invoice.
- Bozeman
- Belgrade
- Gallatin Gateway
- Big Sky
- Livingston
- Paradise Valley
- Bridger Canyon
- Manhattan and Three Forks
- Emigrant and Pray
- Ennis, with notice
Further out is usually still a yes. We have cooked in Ennis, Wisdom and once memorably at a ranch outside Wilsall with power from a generator. Ask, and we will tell you what the travel and the mobile kitchen would add before you decide.
Come and taste it
Tastings run four to six months ahead for weddings and private dinners. Send a date and a rough headcount and we will tell you whether we are free.