A Park City hotel celebrated the longest day of the year with a two-night Summer Solstice Flame-to-Table dinner series on June 21 and 22, inspired by Austrian tradition and led by visiting Michelin-starred chef Klemens Gold.
The event, held at the Goldener Hirsch, Auberge Resorts Collection, was started last year by the hotel’s chef as a smaller, one-day event. This time around, the staff decided to level up and invited Gold and his wife to the property — the chef’s first-ever visit to the United States.
Gold said the opportunity, and the people he’s met in Park City, has been amazing.
“I arrived late at night. (So) the next morning, I woke up and went hiking to get an overview. The land is so vast! That’s when I really felt the size of America,” he said. “Then we met the first people, it was super cool. So warm-hearted, genuine souls. Everything felt like it would run smoothly. No pressure, no stress, just an easygoing vibe, and that feeling stayed with us.”
Gold also holds a Michelin Green Star for sustainability for his restaurant RAU, located on the border of Austria’s Kalkalpen National Park. At RAU, the menus are inspired by nature, often featuring foraged ingredients and telling layered stories through food. That ethos carried over to Park City, where Gold spent the week before the dinners hiking, fly fishing and visiting local farms to source ingredients directly from the land.
The dinners were inspired by the Bergfeuer, a summer solstice tradition in Austria where mountaintop fires are lit in celebration, but also told a nature-themed story. The five-course menu, plus an optional wine pairing of Austrian wines, featured some ingredients sourced from local purveyors and even foraged by Gold himself throughout the Wasatch Back. Guests were seated at a long communal table in the hotel’s garden — where live fires and grills were also set up — and each course was designed to reflect the life and habitat of animals in Utah.
First was “Young Trout,” an Austrian take on a ceviche, served cold and plated among sand and rocks to reflect a stream. The second course, “Wildfire + Rebirth,” was designed to mimic the behavior of fire in the land, burning but then allowing for new growth among the char. The dish, a cassava root soaked in squid ink to look like a charred log, was served with dots of a green pesto-like sauce and miniature mushrooms. For the wow factor, the food was covered with flashpaper, so fire burned across the plate before disappearing and revealing the edible “landscape” — though Friday night’s guests missed out on the spectacle due to high winds.
The next courses, “Bison Walk By the River” and a small interlude, were plated to reflect what the animal sees, Gold explained. A crayfish sauce and roasted seaweed garnish in the third course nodded to the river in the scene, while the next was a spin off of a traditional cheese course, meant to envision a field of flowers and berries across the water. A bright pink currant-flavored foam was topped with dehydrated feta and flower petals for an unusual salty-sour-sweet dish.
For the fifth course, the dessert course, Gold recreated the “Forest Floor” with locally foraged elements like wild mint and elderflowers. A crunchy black lime crumple was made to look like soil, and tapioca pearls nestled throughout were imitation snail eggs. As a dessert, the dish was light and summery, not overly sweet.
To again tie in the traditions of Austria, Gold created a surprise sixth course, a Dutch pancake or Kaiserschmarrn.
It was a playful meal that demonstrated why Gold’s earned such high recognition with a Michelin star. But it also gave hotel staff the opportunity to learn, said Pierce Everett, director of food and beverage. The hotel’s general manager, James Miller, said Goldener Hirsch has never done an event like this before, but it’s something that aligns with its “soul.”
“All of the Auberge properties, we have what we call ‘soul of the place.’ So it’s who we are, how we’re defined, what people think about when they come to see us,” Miller explained. “Our soul of the place is: ‘We honor Old World traditions with a playful twist creating modern Alpine experiences.’ I mean, I can’t think of a more relevant evening than what we’re doing.”
He thanked the hotel’s owner, Hope Eccles, who was in attendance Friday for allowing the team to “play in this type of sandbox.”
With hope for more events like these, and restaurant renovations planned for completion this year, the Goldener Hirsch team expressed a desire to keep pushing the Park City culinary scene to even greater heights.
As Gold put it: “I believe we now know everything we need to bring nature to the table. The nature that surrounds us, and the nature of the people living here. Food can connect art, culture, nature, and above all, people. That’s why we’re here. To come together and enjoy life. And Park City is full of the right people to do just that.”