“Taste has huge power.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself, which is probably why these words were said not by me, but by the incomparable Alice Waters, to an attentive dinner crowd gathered in Stillwater Cove on the northern California coast. Taste was on full display last weekend at the Pebble Beach Food and Wine Festival, set against an idyllic ocean backdrop reminiscent of Big Little Lies, which was filmed nearby in Monterey. Since 2008, Pebble Beach has drawn the country’s best chefs and sommeliers for a four-day event that could only be accurately described as a Super Bowl for anyone with as much as a lick of interest in food and drink.
Intimate themed lunches, dinners, lectures, and events filled the weekend’s calendar, sandwiched between two large tasting pavilion events on Saturday and Sunday, where more than 40 chefs offered up signature dishes including something called a “Donut Duck Dog” (a duck frankfurter stuffed inside a glazed donut with black truffle).
In attendance throughout the weekend were celebrated culinary icons and chefs like Waters, Nancy Silverton, and Giada de Laurentiis. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of dinners that celebrated flavors from around the globe, like “Spice, A Night in India” hosted by Pooja Bavishi, Maneet Chauhan, Vijay Kumar, and Kiran Verma, or “A Taste of Kwéyòl”—billed as a culinary journey from St. Lucia to Jamaica, Miami, and New Orleans—with Nina Compton, Camari Mick, and Nyesha Arrington.
I had never been to a food and wine festival before and though the first “welcome” night felt mildly overwhelming, the lunches and dinners themselves felt luxurious—as they should, considering the steep cost to enter. Tickets start at $450 for a one-day tasting pavilion pass and go up to $7,500 for an all-access weekend complete with private cabanas and exclusive golf events. (It should be noted that the festival is hosted by Pebble Beach Company Foundation, which is a non-profit centered around empowering the community’s youth, so a portion of the ticket sales goes to support the organization.) There was simply… a LOT of everything, and seemingly no way to try each and every bite.
Nevertheless, I tried to sample as much as my stomach and alotted time allowed. Without further ado, my favorite bites of the weekend:
Alice Waters’s Olive Oil Cake was the best I’ve ever had.
Chef Heena Patel’s incredibly delicious vegetable korma and paratha at a plant-based lunch.
A “Pea Party” by Chef Ayesha Nurdjaja (who helms Shukette, one of my favorite restaurants in New York)—a combination of snap peas, snow peas, and asparagus, tossed in zhoug.
My only gripe of the weekend is that the bites—the above highlights notwithstanding—felt very meat-heavy. If I were strictly vegan, I would be pounding the Driscoll’s berry booth for each of my meals. I can’t remember seeing a single vegan bite in the tasting pavilions, though the festival team was able to accommodate dietary restrictions when noted.
I would have loved to see some representation of plant-forward dishes outside of the special vegetarian lunch—especially given the fact that California is home to some of the best produce in the country, and many chefs around the state and beyond are working with plants in inventive ways.
All in all, however, it was a buzzy, unique weekend and I appreciated the chance to watch chefs from around the country cook together in such close quarters. I couldn't have asked for more—except maybe a few additional stomachs, an arsenal of digestive bitters, and some Lactaid.
