Chefs' Camp
Behind the scenes of the cuisine at the
International Pinot Noir Celebration
By Peter Szymczak
Photo by Andrea Johnson
McMinnville, Ore. — It’s a balmy
Friday night in late July on the campus of Linfield College, and the parade
of plates—more than 3,000 of them
this night alone—has begun.
Four courses, each created by a different top Northwest chef and accompanied by outstanding wines, are served to 800 people in about two hours at the Grand Dinner, the kick-off event to the weekend of food- and wine-driven activities at the International Pinot Noir Celebration (IPNC).
It’s an amazing feat, all the more so considering most of the kitchen staff has been on their feet for 12 hours straight.
Even a seasoned chef such as James Beard Award-winning Vitaly Paley, who has cooked at IPNC since 1996, admits it’s a slog. “You know what it’s like to chop parsley for 800 people?” he says with a rhetorical chuckle.
So what keeps him coming back? “There’s so much camaraderie, a shared spirit among all the people,” he says. “Everyone is doing what they love.”
Working alongside Chef Paley—as well as the more than 50 other guest chefs who appear at IPNC—is a supporting cast of about 40 kitchen volunteers, many of whom, like Chef Paley, return year after year. Some of the “K-vols” (kitchen volunteers) donate their precious time off from jobs in the professional restaurant industry for the coveted opportunity to rub shoulders with and learn from the headline chefs. Some are culinary students looking to pick up valuable “on the line” experience and make industry contacts. Rounding out the mix are a handful of local McMinnville residents/amateur culinarians who have been active with IPNC since the early days of the event.
“It’s such a fantastic group of people—magical really,” says IPNC’s Culinary Director Anne Nisbet. “It’s a tremendous amount of work, yet you bring together these different chefs and they create a beautiful meal.”
The Grand Dinner is just one of several colossal meals coordinated by Nisbet, who works year round recruiting the chefs and kitchen volunteers, planning, equipping, budgeting, and staffing for anything that has to do with food. “There are so many moving pieces,” she says. “It’s a bit like planning 20 separate events and then stringing them all together, one after the other, for the long weekend.”
Consulting her spreadsheet of event materials, Nisbet calculates, “We use 8,000 wine stems, 10,000 pieces of flatware, 7,000 pieces of china, 5,500 napkins, 1,200 tablecloths, 325 tables of assorted sizes, 1,350 chairs, and 20 canopies.” These supplies are in use continually during the three-day weekend.
Friday and Saturday mornings begin with Breakfast on the Patio, a Continental spread featuring locally baked breads and pastries, eggs from Willamette Valley farms, cured meats, and fresh fruit and berries. “Farmer John’s in McMinnville brings in gorgeous flats of berries. Fresh peaches come from Pablo’s Peaches, grown ten miles away,” Nisbet says. “People who haven’t been to Oregon are always really wowed by the produce we have here.”
After breakfast on Friday, half of the attendees stay on campus and attend wine seminars or engage in informal activities. Group A enjoys an alfresco lunch prepared by three guest chefs. Meanwhile, the other 400 attendees (Group B) are divided into smaller groups of 30 to 35 people and hop aboard buses heading to 14 secret winery locations for vineyard tours and lunches prepared by a different guest chef at each site. On Saturday, the groups switch so that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy both halves of the afternoon program.
Saturday’s activities are capped by the Northwest Salmon Bake, an à la carte event that attracts upwards of 1,200 attendees for the showcase of wild salmon roasted on alder stakes over a huge custom-built fire pit, plus an outdoor buffet and an extraordinary assortment of hand-crafted desserts (see “Doyens of Dessert” on page 35).
Sunday morning starts with another event for 800—the Sparkling Brunch Finale, which pairs sparkling wines with plates prepared by yet another lineup of guest star chefs. If that isn’t enough, the weekend culminates on Sunday afternoon with one last hot ticket event, Passport to Pinot, which features 60 wineries and another assemblage of guest chefs.
To underscore this year’s IPNC theme—“Down to Earth”—the Grand Dinner chefs will choose a local farmer to work with and highlight a seasonal ingredient, as well as the crucial relationship that exists between the food preparer and producer. “We hope to reinforce the farm-to-table cuisine for which the Northwest has gained much acclaim,” says IPNC’s Executive Director Whitney Gauger.
A Meet the Farmer preview tasting will be held before the Grand Dinner, giving chefs and farmers the opportunity to mingle with attendees and cultivate a greater appreciation for the food that will arrive later on their plate when everyone sits down to dinner.
“It’s a way to share with our guests and communicate through food, without making it too cerebral,” says Nisbet, “because food is meant to be enjoyed.”
For attendees, part of the charm of IPNC is this up-close contact they have with the chefs, farmers, and winemakers, not to mention each other. Viticulturists, epicurean enthusiasts, food and beverage distributors, sommeliers, servers, bloggers—everyone mixes and mingles. There’s no assigned seating at any of the events, so diners could just as easily find themselves seated next to a farmer from Rickreall, Oregon, as a winemaker from the Burgundy region of France, or a top chef from the Northwest.
“Anne [Nisbet] does a great job of finding who the hot chefs are right now and making sure they can pull it off,” says Mark Hosack, executive chef at Gracie’s Restaurant in Portland, Oregon. “Because to pull someone from a 30-seat restaurant and have them execute 400, or 800, plates is quite different.”
Keeping the chefs and kitchen focused is Chef Hosack, who has participated at IPNC for the past eight years and has cooked at every event over the weekend. The last four years he has served as IPNC’s Kitchen Director, overseeing the institutional kitchen at Dillin Hall, which is normally used to feed college students, but which for one weekend in July becomes ground zero for all of IPNC’s food preparation.
“Like myself you have those that have been coming back year after year,” he says. “It’s a hard-to-beat event in the summertime in Oregon because it is so food- and wine-driven. And to be able to be in the center of that is a real treat for me.”
Chef Hosack arrives in McMinnville on Thursday along with most of the other K-vols. “We basically set the stage on Thursday,” he says. “At the end of the day we have a powwow that gets all of the volunteers together, and we’ll have a dinner together and talk about the plan.”
Friday morning he wakes early and arrives in the kitchen around 5:30am. “A lot of the food is prepared within 20 hours of the dinner, including the bulk of the prep,” he says. “So it requires a sense of urgency—from ordering, receiving, to actually putting it on the table.”
The chefs who are preparing lunch start arriving around 7- or 7:30am—and that’s when things really kick into high gear. “Depending on how prepared they are,” Chef Hosack says, “that’s an exercise where I’m asking them, ‘What’s your plan? Let’s talk about your menu item and how we’re going to execute it.’ They have about a four-hour window and during that time the volunteers are right there helping them.”
It’s just like a working restaurant, he says: “You have the produce guy delivering the mid-afternoon berries. You have the bread folks delivering the bread for lunch, and they come back again for dinner,” he says. “During that process, the next day’s activities are coming in the door, so it’s really a balance of point and shoot—this needs to go here, and this needs to go there.”
In addition to his duties as Kitchen Director, he oversees the Northwest Salmon Bake, teaming up with Jason Stoller Smith of the Dundee Bistro to create a multitude of salads for the buffet. “The end of July is a great time for local ingredients—it’s a snapshot of what we have in the Willamette Valley. That’s really the goal.”
Getting to work with great chefs and phenomenal product is what brings back many of the K-vols, such as Ray Duffield, a 25-year veteran of the restaurant industry and a perennial kitchen volunteer since 2001. “You’re helping these chefs, and they’re just feeding you—‘Try this, try this, try this’—then the wineries that you’re at, they’re bringing back bottles and they’re like—‘Try this, try this, try this.’ You’re eating and tasting as you go all day long, and if you’re not, you’re a fool because it’s great product.”
Kitchen volunteers average ten to 12 hours a day of work for the three days, but their passion for the business is so high that they get enjoyment out of just hanging and talking shop throughout the day.
“It’s a real fun thing to be a part of. Long hours and hard work are the industry standard, so in some respects it’s just another day,” says Duffield. “But what’s cool about IPNC is you have the freedom of being outside and the enthusiasm of those coming in to be a part of it.”
McMinnville residents John and Joan Schindelar are two of the non-restaurant industry K-vols whose enthusiasm for IPNC hasn’t waned during the 20 years they’ve been a part of the event.
John comes from a large family in Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up watching his Romanian grandmother cook and has loved spending time in the kitchen ever since. When the chance to become a kitchen volunteer at IPNC presented itself, he grabbed it, and his wife Joan has come along for the ride.
“It’s amazing the skills that we’ve learned,” he says. But the repeat attraction for John, aside from the opportunity to continue learning about cooking, “is meeting all the great people who put this thing together—the chefs and kitchen volunteers recognize that we aren’t pros, but they still respect the work we do.”
With a little under three months to go until this year’s IPNC, the chefs and K-vols are already starting to plan their time at camp. “I look forward to it every year,” Duffield says. “It takes me a week to recover from it, but when it’s all over you just…” Duffield breathes a sigh of relief. “Three months after that, you’re like, ‘That was a great year, wasn’t it?!’ Then six months down the road you’re thinking, in six months it will be IPNC again,” he says with excitement.
Chef Hosack sums it up this way: “It’s just a very casual, relaxed, extended barbecue. You can strike up a conversation with a sommelier, and he or she could give you a whole dissertation on their experience—that’s what makes it fun.”
And that’s what keeps the chefs coming back to “camp” year after year. •
For more IPNC details visit IPNC.org, or order your copy of Northwest Palate today!!!
