HIGH HOPES
Hollow Spirits Distillery plans expansion, aims for a Michelin star
The sky is the limit for Hollow Spirits Distillery. It relied on creativity to keep sales flowing and maintaining revenue during pandemic shutdowns. Its originality in marketing not only kept the distillery afloat but also helped it excel beyond expectations.
“We were actually pretty fortunate, because chef (Tristin Rogers) is amazing, and then (manager/ mixologist) Kicker (Gonzales) and those guys that did a lot of different ideas in order to make sales during the pandemic,” Hollow Spirits founder Frank Holloway said. “So we were actually up last year in sales, believe it or not. So now because of that, we’re in the process of building an elevated patio at Hollow Spirits. … And then we’re going to expand the bar, then we’re going to expand the kitchen.”
Hollow Spirits is located at 1324 1st St. NW, where the second-floor patio will have an unobstructed view of the Sandia Mountains. It will wrap around the building, so guests can view the sunset as well.
Elevating its patio is not where the growth stops for Hollow Spirits. It soon will be canning its bestselling cocktail, Lavender Moon, as well as its Guava Lava. Plans for an agave spirits drink also are in the works. The cocktails will be ready to drink and made to be poured over ice. Holloway hopes to get the canned cocktails into breweries, restaurants and stores when revised liquor
laws in New Mexico take effect on July 1.
“We wanted to kind of make it easy for people just to grab a can and go golfing or especially with the breweries being able to serve New Mexico spirits and then a lot of restaurants being able to serve liquor spirits, we don’t want them to have to go through making a full craft cocktail,” Holloway said. “So this will be really easy for them to just crack open a can, pour it over ice, and then you have a craft cocktail that’s really good that you can give to your customers.”
Holloway also has his eye on a property next to Hollow Spirits and is in negotiations with that building’s owner about going into a partnership.
“Right now with canning,
with making bourbon, with doing aged agave spirits, we need more space,” Holloway said. “So we’re trying to get a lot of it to be warehouse space, an event space for parties, and the fine-dining dinners that we have. So we want to do that over there. Also one of my goals is I want to do a fine-dining restaurant for Tristin. When we kind of started this Hollow Spirits thing, we were, like, ‘We’re gonna have a distillery where there’s food.’ And eventually I want to create a fine-dining restaurant.”
Holloway hopes creating a fine-dining restaurant with Rogers at the helm will bring one of highest recognitions in the culinary world — a Michelin star. Rogers has received several accolades, including being named the 2020 Chef of the Year by the New Mexico Restaurant Association.
“We want a Michelin star,” Holloway said. “That’s really is our goal, and what we want
to do because I think Tristin can do it. We’ve just got to build the right place for him to be able to do it. … And I think once we get one star, it will bring attention to all the chefs in New Mexico because we really do have talented people. It’s just a matter of getting the rest of the nation, the rest of the world to look at us and realize we have badass people here.”
Holloway is grateful to have come through the thick of the pandemic on the top with the help of a skeleton crew.
“Unfortunately, we did have to furlough some people, but they got unemployment and they were surviving,” Holloway said. “So we we’re able to cut our costs and our labor aggressively. And then, fortunately, chef Rogers was doing all those takeouts. And then you had Kicker and Michael Berry; they were
creating those drinks to go when we we’re selling bottles. So we had a lot of different revenue streams available to us that we could earn money. So when we were closed down, we were able to tread water.”
As Hollow Spirits closed and opened during the pandemic, it never lost customers.
“Literally, anytime that we’re open, whether it’s inside or outside, were absolutely slammed,” Holloway said. “… Pretty much every day, we have some kind of wait. … We’ve been extremely fortunate, and people are supporting local. We’re very fortunate we’re making it through this and we’re actually, I’d even go as far as to say, we’ve been successful during the pandemic. But a lot of it is because I have a bunch of badasses around me who know what they’re doing.”