About
I cooked on the line in San Francisco for nine years, moved up here for the produce, and started catering out of a commissary kitchen in 2015.
Who cooks it
That is what we are known for, along with menus built around whatever is actually in season. It is a short sentence doing a lot of work, so the rest of this page is the long version: where the technique came from, why a wedding is harder than a restaurant service, and what changed when we left the city.
Long Table Catering · Sonoma
Where the technique came from
I started as a commis in a tasting-menu kitchen in Hayes Valley, which is a polite way of saying I picked herbs and cleaned the walk-in for a year. That kitchen ran a nine-course menu that changed every few weeks, and nothing left the pass until the chef had looked at it. Most nights, a plate came back. You learn quickly that “close enough” is a decision somebody else has to eat.
From there it was garde manger, then fish, then four years on sauté at a seafood restaurant on the Embarcadero that turned two seatings a night, seven nights a week. Two hundred and forty covers on a Saturday, every one of them cooked to order. My last three years in the city were as sous chef in a small Italian room in North Beach where we made every pasta in the building that morning and threw out whatever we hadn’t sold.
None of that is glamorous and none of it is a shortcut. It is nine years of repetition under people who cared more about the food than about being liked, and it is the only reason a stove in a tent doesn’t frighten me.
Why we take it seriously
In a restaurant you have your own kitchen, your own equipment, and a guest who ordered four minutes ago. Catering has none of that. The kitchen is whatever is behind the barn. The power is an extension lead somebody ran that morning. A hundred and forty people sit down at the same moment, all expecting food that is hot, and you get one attempt at it.
Most catered food is bad for an honest reason: it is cooked early, held warm for two hours, and served tired. The banquet-hall taste people complain about is not a lack of skill, it is a lack of timing. So we solve for timing. We cook on site. We bring our own fire. We build menus where the components that suffer from sitting are the ones finished last, and we walk the room before service to work out how far the food has to travel to the far table.
That is the whole trick, and it is not really a trick. It is a professional kitchen’s habits, moved outdoors and applied to one dinner instead of three hundred.
What changed when we moved
I came up to Sonoma in 2015 for a week and did not go back. In the city I was ordering from a list. Up here I was standing in a field in July arguing with a grower about whether the tomatoes had another four days in them. That is a better way to decide what goes on a menu, and once you have cooked that way it is very hard to go back to writing a menu in February for a dinner in August.
So we do it the other way round. We agree the shape of your dinner months ahead — family style or plated, how many courses, what the room can take — and we write the actual dishes close to the date, around what is genuinely good that week. It means we cannot hand you a fixed menu in January. It also means nothing on your table is there because it was convenient to order.
The first two years were one commissary kitchen, one van and a lot of Saturdays. It is a proper crew now, most of whom came out of restaurants too, and the standard is the one I was taught: nothing leaves unless somebody senior has looked at it.
Request a quote
Send the date, the headcount and roughly what you had in mind. We will come back with a menu and a price — and if a tasting makes sense, we will set one up.
Your mail app should have opened with the date, the headcount and everything else already written in — press send, and we will come back with a menu and a price.
If nothing opened, write to events@longtablesonoma.com or call (707) 555-0554, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.