It’s been 4 years since the team behind Little Hollows Pasta started hand-making fresh pasta in Bristol. Now, what began as a local food stall has grown into a fully fledged restaurant — one of many independent businesses to emerge after the height of the pandemic
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00:00And now I'm an absolutely crazy pasta lady and obsessed with it. It's fantastic.
00:05It's been four years since the team behind Little Hollow's Pasta started hand-making fresh pasta in Bristol.
00:13Now, what began as a local food stall has grown into a fully-fledged restaurant,
00:19one of the many independent businesses to emerge after the height of the pandemic.
00:24In fact, after Covid, Bristol's independent businesses saw a rise of 18.1%.
00:31Now, in 2025, there are over 50,000 independent businesses in the city.
00:37And Little Hollow's have one of the unusual jobs of making fresh pasta for Bristolians every single day.
00:44Let's find out from their team why they decided to take the risk opening after the pandemic.
00:49It was kind of off the back of Covid where we felt like we'd really connected with a lot of customers in Bristol.
00:58And they really seemed to like our proposition and what we were doing.
01:03And I think the way I was running the business before as a kind of, you know, a one-person entity,
01:09it was quite hard to make it work like that.
01:13Little Hollow's focuses on handmade fresh pasta that has become the hallmark of their offering.
01:19Prepared on site each day.
01:20It's a labour-intensive process, but one that taps into a growing demand for craft food made from scratch.
01:27Every day, the pasta specialists do what they do best, make pasta.
01:31Ultimately, if you make something and it feels good to you, that's fantastic.
01:36That's good for the heart, for the soul.
01:38But if it's not being well-responded to and no one's ordering it,
01:41well, shops are the heart, but you've got to change it.
01:45And it's just, it's just a little evolution of that.
01:47We've put non-gluten dishes on for the mains, but they never really went down that well.
01:52So we're like, fine, we'll keep doing what we love.
01:54Make sure there's always other offerings out there, but something that makes sense to us.
01:59And now the longer we've been open, the more we have our character, I guess.
02:03And we know who our personality is.
02:05And it's just really easy to dig into that and keep going.
02:08So these are cappelletti, but it's for a vegan dish.
02:14So the normal pasta we make is made with double zero flour and eggs.
02:18We use special pasta eggs to get a nice colour and a good kind of fat content.
02:22But these are made with a semolina dough.
02:24So grano duro, which is coarse semolina and water.
02:29So you have a vegan dough.
02:30And then it's kind of slow-cooked shallots and onions.
02:36So you get that really rich, sweet flavour.
02:39And that's the filling.
02:40So we try and source as much as we can from local businesses.
02:45And even the stuff we import, we buy through a local value-running importer called Nenona in Cleveland.
02:53So I think it's really important to keep that money in the local economy.
02:56It all goes towards employment in the local area.