Feasts in the Fields

For more than a decade, Jim Denevan, artist, chef and surfer has staged amazing outdoor dinners with his roving culinary adventure, Outstanding in the Field.

Click to open slideshow. Photos by Jeremy Fenske, reprinted with permission from Outstanding in the Field.

Spectacular settings are a hallmark of Jim Denevan’s Outstanding in the Field dinners. As an accomplished artist who creates elaborate  multi-mile drawings in sand, earth and ice, Denevan has an eye for landscapes. Over the years he has set up tables in exotic locations all over North America: a sea cave near Half-Moon Bay in California, an isthmus near Seattle and the top of the highest hill in Brenham, Texas where the table curved around the peak providing 360-degree views. “Like my artwork, the dinners are a celebration of a moment in time,” he says. “I’m composing a work in the field.”

Born and raised in California, Denevan, 50, began experimenting with dinners in the late 90s on a few California farms. Guests dined where their food was grown. “People could eat at the source, on the very soil that nourished the bounty on the plate in the company of the farmers who cultivated it,” he explains. He got the idea while working as an executive chef at an Italian eatery in Santa Cruz where he occasionally held special dinners featuring local produce and invited the farmers to talk about the food they’d grown. During those dinners, he noticed something interesting. “People were fascinated with what the farmers had to say,” he recalls. So he thought it would be even more interesting to bring guests to farms where they could eat fresh, seasonal, organic fare and dine in an unforgettable, natural setting with the farmers.

With a serious case of wanderlust and the conviction that he was onto a great idea, Denevan quit his job in 2004, purchased a 1953 red-and-white Flxible bus (rumored to have been one of Elvis’ former tour buses) for $7,000 and named it Outstanding. That summer he toured North America hosting 13 dinners—hiring regional chefs to cook local ingredients along the way. Guests were a part of the adventure, even bringing their own plates for several of the first dinners.

As Denevan suspected, the concept caught on. “The idea of dining on a farm has swept North America as a cultural experience and a way to embrace community,” he says. Outstanding in the Field has grown from 13 dinners in 1999 to almost 100 North American dinners this summer. He has plans to stage al fresco feasts worldwide beginning this September when he will load up the Flxible bus, and send it on a ship across the Atlantic for OITF’s first European tour.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 10th, 2011 at 9:52 am. It is filed under Creative Culture, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.