CHEFS ON HOLIDAY

I'D HEARD OF Chef's Holidays at the Ahwahnee, and even considered buying tickets, but I was a little unsure what kind of crowd I might encounter there. I expected a crowd of high-rollers, people who are way too affluent to chat with regular folkssuch as myself.
WRONG.
As it turns out, the people who love Yosemite, and who care enough to attend Chef's Holidays are just plain regular folk. They tend to enjoy the outdoors, love nature, and appreciate history and art. Sure, you get a few more foodies at an event like this, but these are not your generic SF foodies who are so informed and opinionated that they'll embarass you out of the room.
During the three days I was there, me and my companion met people from San Diego who love to cook, including Mario, who claims he can peel a potato faster than anyone else in the world.
We also visited with Jen and Dustin, whose job is to place youth pastors at loose ends into exactly the right church youth group, then happened to befriend a pair who make it their business to eat at the fanciest restaurants they can find -- including Manresa in Los Gatos, where they paid $400 per head for an exquisite meal.
All of you who think that your lack of food knowledge means you should not go to Chef's Holidays, can I just tell you that it is not. During cooking demonstration sessions, it became clear that the majority of audience members do not live in their kitchens. For example, the bulk of attendants were unaware of what EVOO stood for (sorry Rachael) and when asked who knew what the term "umami" meant, nearly 75 percent raised their hands.
That said, you need to know that Chef's Holidays puts you face-to-face with the best. You will learn unexpected things about food, taste some things (like duck rillette) that -you never even wondered about.
During the first session, we slurped French wine with David Kinch from Manresa in Los Gatos, laughed with Cal Stameov of Marinus Restaurant at Bernardus in Monterey (that's him smiling in the top photo), and swapped wine cork stories with Matt Bolton (Cal's former sous chef) at Pacific's Edge in Carmel.
Hint: If you want more chat-time with the chefs, hang out in the lobby, and don't talk shop. The last thing a chef who's spent the whole day in the kitchen wants to talk about is food.