The Hollows: How A Saskatoon Heritage Cafe Became Christie Peters' Prairie Chef-Driven Anchor
Christie Peters and Kyle Michael took over the old Golden Dragon Cafe space on 20th Street in 2011. Fifteen years later, the original tin ceiling and red booths are still there, and the kitchen below them has set the bar for chef-driven prairie food in Saskatoon.
May 3, 2026 · By Justin Plosz · Saskatoon, Saskatchewan · Business · 10 min read
The Quick Picture
The Hollows sits at 334 Avenue C South in Saskatoon, in the city's Riversdale district, several blocks west of Idylwyld Drive and the downtown core. The address used to be the Golden Dragon Cafe — a Cantonese-Canadian diner that ran on the same corner from the 1950s through the 2000s, serving the kind of small-prairie-city Chinese-Canadian menu that was common across the West for most of the twentieth century. The diner closed in the late 2000s, and the building was empty for a stretch before chef Christie Peters and partner Kyle Michael took it over in 2011 and reopened it as The Hollows.
The load-bearing decision in the conversion was to preserve the heritage room rather than gut it. The original 1950s pressed-tin ceiling stayed. The original red vinyl booths stayed. The Golden Dragon's neon was kept. The room reads, on first walk-in, like an old prairie diner that someone is still running. The kitchen underneath it, however, runs a substantially different menu: a seasonal, ingredient-forward, chef-driven prairie programme that has, over fifteen years, become one of the most-cited single restaurant kitchens in Western Canada.
The contrast — old room, new kitchen — is the editorial fact of The Hollows. It is also part of why the restaurant has been so durable. The room is not a concept; it is a heritage Saskatoon dining room. The kitchen is not a heritage diner; it is a working chef-driven prairie programme. Both halves of the operation are doing what they are good at, and neither is pretending to be the other.
Christie Peters And Kyle Michael
The chef-and-partner team behind The Hollows is Christie Peters and Kyle Michael. Peters is the chef of record and has, since the restaurant's 2011 opening, become one of the most-cited working prairie chefs in the country. Her cooking is built on a small, recognisable set of commitments: source as locally as possible, preserve aggressively across the seasons (pickling, fermenting, drying, smoking, freezing) so that the menu can be built around prairie ingredients year-round, work directly with farms and foragers rather than through commodity distribution, and treat the prairie larder as the menu's first reference point rather than its garnish.
Michael handles the front of house and the operations side of the partnership. The split is conventional in chef-driven independent restaurants and is generally invisible to customers — what shows up at the table is the result of both halves of the operation working in sync. The Hollows' room is run with the same standards as the kitchen, which is unusual at this level of prairie independent dining and is part of why the restaurant works as a complete experience rather than as a kitchen with a service problem.
Peters and Michael also run Primal Pasta, an Italian-leaning pasta-and-natural-wine restaurant in the same Saskatoon catchment. The two restaurants are separate operations with separate kitchens but share the same ownership team, the same supplier relationships, and the same disposition toward the prairie larder. Together they amount to one of the most coherent independent restaurant groups in Western Canada by an owner-operator chef team.
The Heritage Room
Walking into The Hollows, the room is the first thing you notice. The Golden Dragon's bones are still there. The pressed-tin ceiling — the kind installed in twentieth-century commercial spaces across North America and now mostly destroyed during renovations — is intact and overhead. The red vinyl booths are reupholstered but in the same dimensions and configuration as the original Golden Dragon arrangement. The bar is built into the room rather than as an addition. The lighting is warm. The art on the walls is curated and rotates.
The preservation was a deliberate choice. The cheaper renovation would have been a gut-and-rebuild that turned the room into a generic chef-driven dining room of the kind that exists in every Canadian city. The Hollows did the harder thing and kept the heritage diner architecture, then ran a chef-driven kitchen inside it. The decision is, in effect, a piece of editorial restraint: the room belongs to Riversdale, it has been there since the 1950s, and it should continue to feel like a Saskatoon room rather than a New York imitation.
The consequence for the dining experience is that customers eat in a heritage room that almost no other prairie restaurant has — a working twentieth-century commercial interior preserved at its working scale rather than reconstructed as a museum object. Most national food-press coverage of the restaurant references the room before it references the menu, which is unusual and which speaks to how successful the preservation has been.
The Prairie Larder Menu
The kitchen's menu rotates aggressively with the prairie growing season. In summer and early autumn, when Saskatchewan farms are producing at full volume, the menu leans into fresh produce — beets, carrots, brassicas, prairie greens, foraged mushrooms, herbs, berries, and whatever else the suppliers are running. In late autumn, the menu starts incorporating the year's preserves — fermented vegetables, pickles, smoked items, dried fruits and meats — at higher density. By midwinter, when fresh prairie produce is largely unavailable, the menu is mostly built on what the kitchen put up during the previous summer's preserving programme, supplemented by hardy winter produce and proteins.
This is the canonical prairie-larder approach to year-round restaurant cooking, and The Hollows runs it more disciplined-ly than most prairie restaurants. The preserves programme is non-trivial; a meaningful share of the kitchen's summer labour goes into putting up product for the dark months. The menu in February is therefore not a copy of the menu in August — it is the same kitchen drawing on a different part of the larder, and the customer experience in February is its own thing rather than a thinned version of the August menu.
Proteins on the menu rotate similarly. Saskatchewan farms produce excellent beef, pork, lamb, bison, and poultry, and the menu draws from those supply chains directly. Fish is a smaller part of the programme — the prairie is not coastal — but does appear, often through smoked or cured preparations. Foraged ingredients appear seasonally, and the kitchen's relationships with prairie foragers are part of why The Hollows can put items on the menu that other Saskatoon restaurants cannot.
The Wine And Cocktail Programme
The Hollows runs a tight wine and cocktail programme alongside the kitchen. The wine list leans toward natural and small-producer wines, with selections that match the kitchen's prairie-larder approach — wines that are made the way the food is made, by small producers in direct relationships with the people serving the wine. The list rotates as the menu rotates and is curated rather than encyclopaedic; on any given night the customer is choosing from a tight set of considered options rather than from a thousand-bottle generic list.
The cocktail programme is similarly disciplined. The menu runs a small set of well-executed house cocktails alongside classics, with house-made tinctures, syrups, and infusions appearing in the rotation. The bar takes itself seriously without being precious; cocktails arrive at the table on time and at the standard the kitchen sets. This is the right disposition for a chef-driven independent restaurant of this size and is part of why The Hollows reads as a complete experience rather than as a kitchen with a beverage afterthought.
For pairings, The Hollows generally lets customers self-select rather than pushing structured pairings, but the front of house can recommend through the menu intelligently if asked. The Riversdale catchment customer base, which is a meaningful share of the regular trade, knows how to use the wine list, and the room handles drink-led dining and food-led dining equally well.
The Saskatoon Chef Workforce
Beyond the menu, The Hollows has played a meaningful role in training the current Saskatoon chef workforce. Multiple chefs working in independent kitchens across the city, and several restaurant owner-operators in the catchment, came through The Hollows' kitchen at some stage in their careers. This is, in 2026, one of the harder-to-quantify but most editorially significant facts about the restaurant: it has been a training kitchen for the city's independent dining scene for fifteen years, and the disposition of Saskatoon chef-driven cooking in 2026 carries Peters' fingerprints in places where her name does not appear on the menu.
This is not unique to The Hollows — every major chef-driven restaurant of long standing trains chefs who go on to open or run other rooms — but it is unusually concentrated in Saskatoon's case because the city's independent dining scene is small enough that a single influential kitchen can shape a meaningful share of it. Peters' commitments — local sourcing, aggressive preservation, prairie-larder year-round cooking, heritage-room preservation in renovations — are visible across the Riversdale and downtown Saskatoon dining catchments at restaurants Peters does not run.
For a national-press reader trying to understand why Saskatoon's independent dining scene is more sophisticated than its population would suggest, The Hollows is a meaningful part of the answer.
The PRC Editorial View
The Hollows is, in 2026, one of the most consequential single restaurants on the Canadian prairies. It is operated by a chef who has set a national-press benchmark for prairie cooking. It runs a heritage Saskatoon room that no chain operator would have preserved. It runs a year-round prairie-larder menu more disciplined-ly than most prairie restaurants. It has trained a meaningful share of the current Saskatoon independent dining workforce. It has stayed independently owned and operated by the founding chef-and-partner team for fifteen years. None of these things are normal.
For visitors planning a Saskatoon itinerary that takes the city's food culture seriously, The Hollows is the canonical first booking. The room is small, the menu rotates fast enough that booking ahead is the sensible move, and the experience repays slow eating and conversation. Order the kitchen's recommendation, drink off the wine list, and pay attention to the tin ceiling overhead — almost no other prairie city has a working dining room of this kind, and The Hollows is the reason Saskatoon does.
Key takeaways
- The Hollows is a chef-driven independent restaurant at 334 Avenue C South in Saskatoon's Riversdale district, opened in 2011 by chef Christie Peters and partner Kyle Michael.
- The restaurant occupies the heritage Golden Dragon Cafe space — a Cantonese-Canadian diner that ran on the same corner from the 1950s — and preserved the original 1950s tin ceiling, red vinyl booths, and architectural features rather than gutting the room.
- The kitchen runs a seasonal, ingredient-forward, prairie-larder menu built on local Saskatchewan produce, foraging, and aggressive in-house preserving — pickling, fermenting, drying, and smoking — to support a year-round chef-driven menu.
- The wine programme leans toward natural and small-producer wines; the cocktail programme runs house tinctures, syrups, and infusions alongside classics.
- Christie Peters has become one of the most-cited working prairie chefs in Canadian national food-press coverage.
- Peters and Michael also operate Primal Pasta, an Italian-leaning pasta-and-natural-wine restaurant in the same Saskatoon catchment under the same ownership team.
- The Hollows has trained a meaningful share of the current Saskatoon independent chef workforce over its fifteen-year run and has shaped the disposition of chef-driven cooking across the city.
Frequently asked questions
- Where is The Hollows located?
- The Hollows is at 334 Avenue C South in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in the city's Riversdale district. The address is the heritage Golden Dragon Cafe building, several blocks west of Idylwyld Drive and the downtown core. Reservations are recommended; current hours are at thehollows.ca.
- Who owns The Hollows?
- The Hollows was opened in 2011 and is owned and operated by chef Christie Peters and partner Kyle Michael. Peters is the chef of record and Michael handles front of house and operations. The restaurant has remained under the founding ownership team for fifteen years and is fully independently owned, with no chain or restaurant-group affiliation.
- What was the building before it was The Hollows?
- The building was the Golden Dragon Cafe — a Cantonese-Canadian diner that operated on the same corner from the 1950s through the 2000s. The Golden Dragon's 1950s pressed-tin ceiling, red vinyl booth configuration, and original architectural features were preserved during the 2011 conversion to The Hollows rather than gutted.
- What kind of food does The Hollows serve?
- The Hollows runs a seasonal, ingredient-forward, chef-driven prairie menu built around local Saskatchewan produce, foraging, and in-house preserving (pickling, fermenting, drying, smoking). The menu rotates aggressively with the prairie growing season — fresh produce-led in summer and autumn, preserves-led through winter — with proteins drawn from Saskatchewan farms (beef, pork, lamb, bison, poultry).
- Is The Hollows the same as Primal Pasta?
- No, but they share an ownership team. Primal Pasta is a separate Italian-leaning pasta-and-natural-wine restaurant in the same Saskatoon catchment, also operated by Peters and Michael. The two restaurants have separate kitchens and menus but share supplier relationships and ownership.
- Is the wine list good?
- Yes. The Hollows runs a curated, tight wine list that leans toward natural and small-producer wines — selections chosen to match the kitchen's prairie-larder approach. The list rotates with the menu and is built for considered selection rather than for encyclopaedic browsing. The cocktail programme runs on the same disposition: a small set of well-executed house cocktails alongside classics, with house-made tinctures, syrups, and infusions.
- Should I book ahead?
- Yes. The Hollows runs a small dining room and is consistently busy, particularly on weekend evenings and during peak summer prairie produce season. Reservations through thehollows.ca or by phone are the recommended approach for any planned visit.
- Why is The Hollows considered important nationally?
- The Hollows has been cited consistently across national food-press coverage as one of Saskatoon's most important restaurants and as a defining example of chef-driven prairie cooking in Western Canada. Christie Peters' work — heritage-room preservation, prairie-larder year-round menu construction, aggressive in-house preserving, direct farm and forager relationships — has influenced restaurants across the prairies and shaped a meaningful share of the current Saskatoon independent chef workforce, multiple of whom trained in The Hollows' kitchen.
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