Foodievents

What We’re All Missing at the Pebble Beach Food & Wine Fest

Photo: Courtesy of PBF&W

Grub Street couldn’t make it to the Pebble Beach Food & Wine fest this year — even if we had been invited — but hey, we can all check out the itinerary and dream of the day we can get drunk on the golf course with Chiarello, right? See our preview of this weekend’s festivities for the rich and culinarily famous below.

Thursday, April 8th - Celebrity chefs like Wolfgang Puck, Charlie Trotter, Charles Phan, and the Keller twins (not), Hubert and Thomas, were all invited to participate in a golf tournament today with winemakers, in which they started getting drunk on Krug champagne on the first tee.

Tonight, starting right about now at 6 p.m., is the opening reception, featuring 200 wines and nibbles from 20 chefs including Alain Passard, Masaharu Morimoto, Jacques Pépin, the boys from Animal and Church & State in L.A., and Liza Shaw from A16 in SF.

Friday, April 9th - The morning kicks off with some wine tastings and cooking demos, including one by Thomas Keller using his Ad Hoc at Home recipes.

Multiple lunch options include a Top Chef-themed lunch catered by Jamie Lauren (who’s soon departing SF’s Absinthe), Hosea Rosenberg, and L.A.’s Fabio Vivani.

Dinners appear to be blocked out for four and a half hours apiece (6:30 to 11 p.m.), and Friday’s options include one called “A Study in Classic Compositions” helmed by Thomas Keller and Charlie Trotter, and a Food & Wine Best New Chefs Alumni dinner featuring the Animal boys again, Chris Kostow from Meadowood in Napa, and Mark Sullivan of Spruce in SF. Must be nice.

Saturday, April 10th - For those not too hungover to deal, Saturday morning features cooking demos from Michael Chiarello and Wolfgang Puck, as well as some hair-of-the-dog wine-tasting seminars.

For dinner, Chiarello teams up with fellow Top Chef Masters losers Hubert Keller, Tim Love, Jonathan Waxman, and Roy Yamaguchi to cook a dinner at the Spanish Inn.

But the hotter tickets of the evening are probably a tribute dinner to Péepin (cooked by Trotter, Ken Frank of La Toque, Gina DePalma of Babbo in NYC, and Ming Tsai of Blue Ginger) with Veuve Cliquot pairings; and the Grand Finale dinner cooked by Puck and Sherry Yard of Spago, and Rick Tramonto of TRU in Chicago, all paired with various vintage of Krug champagne. This is a choice we’re frankly happy we don’t have to make.

Sunday, April 11th - From noon to 3 p.m. is the Lexus Grand Tasting in which they whip out 300 wines and every attending chef who still has a breath of life in him or her cooks up some little nibbles to send everyone off with.

Must be nice.

What We’re All Missing at the Pebble Beach Food & Wine Fest