About

A small kitchen, picky about ingredients.

Pike Place Provisions is a small-team Seattle catering kitchen. I'm Janelle Forsberg — I cooked the line at Canlis through my twenties, then ran the corporate-events program for a Seattle hotel group for six years. In 2018 I quit, signed a lease in SoDo, and started Pike Place Provisions because I was tired of catering food I'd never eat myself.

Our kitchen

We run a dedicated nut-free kitchen. No tree nuts, no peanuts, no pine nuts, no sesame seeds. Full stop. We made that decision year one — partly because allergies are real, partly because most caterers handle nuts in the same prep area as everything else, and that's not something we wanted to ask families to trust us on. We provide full allergen documentation per dish for every event over 25 guests.

Other allergens (dairy, gluten, shellfish, soy) we accommodate on request with sufficient lead time — usually two weeks for full menu adaptations.

How we cook

• Seasonal, Pacific Northwest first. We buy from Skagit Valley produce co-ops and a small handful of Olympic Peninsula seafood folks we've worked with for years. Menus shift four times a year.
• Real tastings. For events 50+, we'll cook the actual menu for you and 1–3 guests. $35/person, credited to your final invoice on booking.
• Stationed buffet or sit-down only. We don't do food trucks or sprawling open buffets at weddings — they're a food-safety nightmare and the food gets cold. If that's what you want, we're not the right fit and we'll happily recommend someone who does it well.
• Vegetarian + vegan-on-request. Genuinely good vegetarian dishes — not the pasta primavera afterthought.

The team

Me + Marcus (sous chef, 11 years line cooking) + Theo (events lead) + a rotating crew of 3–8 servers depending on event size. We don't use day-laborers from temp agencies — every server who shows up at your event has worked at least three Pike Place Provisions events first.

We're closed Mondays and Tuesdays for menu development, ingredient sourcing, and (honestly) actual rest. Setup days for big events are an exception.