Service area
BBQ Catering in Incline Villageon the Nevada Shore
That combination matters more than it sounds. Nothing about the job crosses a state line: the same state, the same county offices and the same rules apply at your address as at ours. What is genuinely different is who runs the place from day to day — a great deal of what a resident or a visitor uses here answers to the Incline Village General Improvement District rather than to a county parks department.
- Distance from our base
- about 15 miles northwestStraight-line from 5110 S Edmonds Dr, Carson City — not a road distance.
- County
- Washoe County, Nevada
- Good to know
- An unincorporated community on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe's north shore, governed for most practical purposes by the Incline Village General Improvement District rather than by a town council.
The kind of event a village throws
This is a residential resort community rather than a resort strip, and the calendar follows from that. Private homes, second homes, golf and a steady flow of visiting family produce the smaller, sharper end of the event list: significant birthdays and anniversaries, memorials and celebrations of life, association and club gatherings, and the family weekend that quietly turns into a hundred people on a deck. The host is usually the person who lives there.
The other half is the small corporate booking — twenty or thirty people up for a couple of days, one evening of which is meant to be the good one. Both kinds share something that makes them easier to cater than a public picnic: the guest list is known, it is known early, and the food is the centrepiece rather than the background. Neither, though, is likely to come with a loading dock.
Who you are actually asking permission from
This is the part of a booking here that catches people out, and it is not their fault. There is no mayor and no town council. This is unincorporated Washoe County with a general improvement district running much of what is in front of you, so the answer to “can a caterer set up” depends entirely on who controls that specific piece of ground.
In practice it is three different conversations. A private home is the owner's decision, subject to whatever their association says. A district facility is the district's. Anything on county ground is Washoe County's — the same authority that covers Reno and the valley between. Find out which one you are standing in before you promise anybody a date, and we will work to whatever it turns out to be.
Three things the mountain decides
- Fire restrictions
- Open-flame rules tighten through the dry months and are set by whoever has jurisdiction over your particular site, not by us. Ask early, and tell us exactly what you are told — a restriction is easy to plan around and a surprise is not.
- Power and water
- Assume the site has neither until somebody has stood there and confirmed it. No kitchen is needed at your end, but a plan that quietly depends on an outdoor outlet or a garden hose is a plan with a hole in it.
- The shoulder season
- Dates either side of summer are easier to get and colder to stand in. If the meal is outdoors, decide in advance where people eat if the weather turns — tents travel with us, but a second site does not.
Getting a trailer onto the property
Fifteen miles northwest is the straight line. The road is not. There is no direct route from here to the north shore — you go up and over from the north, or round the eastern shore from the south, and either way the trailer climbs well above lake level before it comes back down to it. That is why we publish a distance and not a duration: on this side of the water the two have very little to do with each other, and rather less of one between November and April.
Inside the village, access decides more than anything else does. The place is built on a slope above the water and a great many of its addresses are wooded lots on narrow, steep driveways with branches hanging low over them. The rotisserie travels on a twenty-foot trailer, and it has to get in, turn, park within reach of the serving line and get back out again. Send a photograph of the driveway and wherever a vehicle can stand; it is worth more to us than any description of the lawn.
Which tier fits a booking up here
Full service, though for a different reason than the mileage. Most of what happens here sits comfortably over the 40-person floor for a full cater and comfortably under the scale of a company field day, which is precisely the size at which a cooker and a crew earn their keep: enough people that a serving line is the right answer, few enough that the line keeps moving. Standard service covers a two-hour serve window.
If the gathering is smaller than 40, say so on the phone rather than reading it off the minimums. A drop-off clears its own floor at 20, but a travel fee applies to it exactly as it does to a full cater, and sending a van up the hill for twenty plates rarely survives the conversation. There is usually a better answer, and now and then it is that we are not it.
What we usually suggest here
Full-service catering
20-person minimum for drop-off and pick-up · 40-person minimum for a full cater. Every event is quoted individually.
Travel fees are added to caters outside our immediate area.
Also nearby
- Lake TahoeEl Dorado County, CA · about 18 miles southwest of our base
- RenoWashoe County, NV · about 29 miles north of our base
Not sure any of these is the right page? Start with what a full cater involves or read the menu.
Tell us about the address
Send the date, the street and a rough headcount — and a photograph of the driveway if it is a private home. We will come back with a straight answer about access first and a quote second, because up here the first one decides the second.