When part-time Park City residents Bob and Lisa Taylor heard the “Chef’s Table” brand was creating a food festival, and that it would be in the Wasatch Back in the summer, they bought in.
The format, which paired ultimately 80 visiting chefs with 27 local venues, asked ticket holders to rank their top chef choices, and a concierge team would design an itinerary with two lunches and two dinners during the three-day festival. So Lisa researched all the chefs and submitted their choices. Then carried on with life.
“We were like, we’ll be there, we’re in, we’ll do it. And we didn’t know anything. It kind of became this joke among our friends like, ‘Are we going to the Fyre Festival? We don’t really know. Is it going to turn out to be anything?’” Lisa said.
Amanda, a lawyer from Philadelphia, had a similar story. She saw an ad for the festival on Instagram, saw that American Express was a sponsor and bought a ticket. But then with a lack of information and communication, she also joked about early similarities to the Fyre Festival — which was marketed as a luxury music festival in the Bahamas, then guests arrived to inadequate accommodations, including unprepared tents and insufficient food.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen, the Taylors said.
“I think, overall, this was incredible for five months — that’s what we’ve heard — five months of planning,” Lisa said. “When you’re in a place like Modena, (Italy), and you’re hoping, ‘Can we, when we’re there for just four days, maybe get into Massimo (Bottura)’s restaurant,’ and no, you cannot. And he’s right here. It’s amazing.”
That access to the chefs made the $2,000 entry-level ticket worth it for Denver-based physician Kevin Chen.
This was his first food festival, and as a self-described “outsider” from the culinary world, how else would he be able to meet someone like Bottura?
“You can just walk up right to them and just say hi and grab a picture,” he said.
His ticket only ensured one meal from his top-ranked chefs, but he said it was great to get to know new chefs. He attended most of the panel discussions at the Wynn Lounge pop up at the Main & Sky hotel. As an extroverted person, he said it’s maybe easier for someone like him to walk up to a chef like Bottura and start a conversation.
It helped that Bottura was so active during the festival. The three-star Michelin chef from Italy said he’s been to food festivals all over the world but loved that the Chef’s Table Festival — from the chef perspective — had such access to the guests.
“You can come and have a conversation like this about everything. And that was something very different from all the other festival or meeting or conference that we have,” he said.
When he heard the event would be in Park City, Bottura, who had come for an event at Deer Valley Resort years ago, was thrilled.
“I said in one second, ‘Yes,’ because I love this place so much,” he said. “This is like the perfect expression of what is United States. … This is the expression of what is Utah. You see mountains, cowboy, very real stuff.”
He and his wife, Laura, moved from their hotel to an apartment off Main Street so they could be closer to the downtown energy. The last time Bottura was in town was winter.
“Now I can see the real Park City. It’s beautiful,” he said. “And I think it’s going to be on and on, because this format is going to be incredibly successful. Imagine 70 chefs from all over the world coming here. Wow! It’s the perfect place.”
From the production side, there was a lot of heavy lifting to make the concept work as it spread out over town. There was a lot put on locals, said Hillary Miko, the festival’s programming director.
“We recognize how much we asked of the Park City restaurant community,” she said.
“Collaborating with new chefs, preparing unfamiliar dishes and serving a highly engaged culinary audience is no small undertaking. Their professionalism and commitment reinforced exactly why we chose Park City.”
Kyle Banks, a Miami-based events manager with COTE Korean Steakhouse, was also impressed by the response of local partners.
He was tasked with organizing Friday’s after-party for participating chefs and ticket holders and said there was a learning curve to setting up in a town like Park City. His team only had a few weeks to get everything together. They’d usually want three months minimum.
“The regulatory landscape of Utah is just a different world than Miami or New York. The liquor licensing, the food service compliance, needing a culinary partner, it was a real educational piece for us,” he said.
But his takeaway, despite a slower-moving process, was generally positive.
“The infrastructure in Miami is kind of established, and you rarely meet the people behind the thing you ordered,” he said. “(In Utah) it’s the ice sculptor that picks up the phone himself and is walking you through exactly what saw bit is going to get the right outcome and why you can’t go so small on that lettering because it’s going to melt too fast.”
The COTE event was held at Firewood on Main, and Banks praised the support from chef-owner John Murcko and general manager Larisa Opris.
“I think we found people that are as driven as our team, and just in a more personal register. There’s a level of camaraderie to every relationship that we built while we were here,” Banks said. “Everyone we met was kind and generous, and slowing down and taking inventory is something that I would say we’re going to take home with us.”
As for next year? Attendees hope to see some improvements. The Taylors attended the pizza party lunch on Saturday, which took over Union Plaza on Main Street. But after spending an hour and a half standing in different lines, Lisa said she hopes they rethink the format.
Other pizza party attendees said they wished there were signs explaining the chef and their pizza. Some also saw opportunities for more marketing, like an area during the event to buy cookbooks so the chefs could sign them. Organizers said they opted to sell cookbooks and other chef products through local retailers The Mercantile and Mountain Town Olive Oil rather than at the specific festival events.
Lisa also wants to see a lot more information ahead of time. It wasn’t until meeting people at festival meals that she learned about the locals’ tickets, where residents could purchase events a la carte. Those tickets were announced a few weeks before the festival, after they’d bought the full package. They definitely want to know about that sooner, Lisa said.
“Our daughter, for example, who’s 30, might come in from L.A., but she’s not going to take Thursday and Friday off to do this. She might want to just go to a meal because her vacation time is precious,” Lisa said. “Or some friends who would maybe want to just come in for a Saturday.”
More available information was an underlying request for next year, Lisa said. For example, when she bought tickets, she didn’t know chefs would be grouped together for events or that they would take different approaches to the meals.
“Our first night, we had a Michelin-star chef, and it was served very much like what we’d experience in that kind of restaurant, in its style and its delivery. And then last night, it was served family style, a lot of huge, heavy comfort food. So a completely different experience,” she said. “I just would probably want to know ahead of time.”
Chen said that as a first-time Park City visitor, it was difficult to find some of the locations for the activities and that the shuttle service was also a bit of a headache. He chocked that up to first-year hiccups and said he expects to see them worked out.
Brendan Coyle, owner of Dendric Estate cidery, was able to participate in a few ways for the inaugural event, such as a tasting pop-up for ticket holders. Conceptually, he’s a fan of the festival and is happy to see the town welcoming opportunities around the culinary arts.
“All the negatives that I’ve heard is just the logistical issues of being the first year,” said Coyle. “Bringing together great food, great beverage in a beautiful place like Park City, it makes total sense. So I would love to see the bugs get worked out and to see it repeat.”
For Amanda, the festival was a huge disappointment. The value of the meals and the core programming didn’t even come close to the $4,000 she paid, she said. Even as one of the early buyers, she also didn’t get her itinerary until a day before the event, despite asking. It meant she paid for two extra nights at a hotel and wasn’t as close to her venues as she’d prefer.
And then, when she arrived, she saw Chef’s Table advertising the locals tickets — $150 for a lunch, $250 for a dinner — and even bought one to prove she could.
“They said we would get four experiences, and the experiences they listed were cooking classes, fly fishing,” she said. Instead, the programming she could access were early morning guided hikes — on free trails, she added — panel discussions, entrance to the festival hub at Le Depot which served food and drink, DJ sets and three after-parties.
She did the math: two lunches at $150, two dinners at $250, that leaves $3,200 to cover the additional ticket-holders programming. On top of that, she had to wait in lines for the duration of the two hour pizza party for food served on paper plates — and even pay extra for drinks, she said.
Plus, almost every attendee she met had been comped as an influencer, media, a friend of the organizers or participating chefs. While it’s not necessarily about the money for her, Amanda said she wouldn’t want someone else, who maybe saved up for the event, to be disappointed like her.
Justin Connor, the president of Chef’s Table Projects, agreed there’s room to improve for next year. Both as the director and as an attendee of the first year, he said he’d want to find ways to engage with the surrounding nature, have more daytime events and expand the non-meal programming.
Miko agreed, calling those the festival’s “playful” side.
“The vast majority of attendee feedback has been positive, and we also appreciate the thoughtful, constructive feedback we received. This was our inaugural year, and we look forward to learning, evolving and improving the experience each year,” she said. “We want to create even more opportunities for chefs to experiment and have fun.”
Jennifer Wesselhoff, president and CEO of Park City Chamber/Bureau, said that, after attending the first event, she feels confident that it has the potential to boost the town economy.
“If anything this week made the case more clearly than I expected. Holding another world-class event in the summer is exactly what we need to support our four-season economy,” she said. “And it’s not lost on me that we just spent four days managing an influx of international visitors, media and high expectations.”
She said it was the relationship building between visiting chefs and locals that could open the door for even more opportunity, not just for the festival’s return.
“When chefs from Peru, Italy, Europe and India are already asking to come back and cook with our local chefs again, that’s the beginning of an ongoing culinary exchange, not a single event,” Wesselhoff said. “I think they liked us.”
While not guaranteed, festival organizers say they look forward to returning to Park City next year. And from a production standpoint, a whole year of preparation can be game changing, said Banks.
“When our team was packing, headed out of town, we were already in this mindset of like, ‘Well, next year this, and next year that,’” Banks said. “(The Chef’s Table) team is really sharp, and I think with a 12-month runway rather than a four-month runway, who knows what they can accomplish?”
Editor’s note: Updates have been made to certain numeral values and job titles for accuracy. A previous version of this article also said the festival would return next year, however a 2027 event in Park City has not been confirmed.