The stars weren't just shining in the sky over the Dolomites this ski season; they were hurtling down black runs, boogieing in apres-ski bars and showing off their skills at high-octane show-cooking events. A galaxy of 50 chefs, many of them with multiple Michelin stars – and some without stars, but with stellar reputations – descended on the Italian alpine village of San Cassiano for the 10th annual Audi Chef's Cup.
The event is a week-long series of lunches and dinners, interspersed with cooking demonstrations, parties and, of course, skiing. Much of the off-piste action takes place in a giant tented party pad at the foot of the precipitous floodlit Gran Risa slope, home of the World Cup giant slalom course.
There was snow golf too, complete with a cooking station and liquid refreshments at the fourth hole, provided by the Veuve Clicquot mobile hospitality unit, an all-terrain snowcat vehicle with a kitchen range capable of cooking at temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees. Sound glamorous? It is, with sleigh bells on, and if you've got fairly deep pockets, most of the events are open to the public.
Chefs and black-piste skiing go together in this part of the world. “The chefs from the Alps always win,” I was told when I asked who was favourite for the competitive races. But even those not born and bred in the mountains are taking to the slopes.
A couple of weeks before the Chef's Cup event, British chefs Heston Blumenthal, Marcus Wareing and Sat Bains had brought their knives and aprons as well as their salopettes to Courmayeur for the Mountain Gourmet Ski Experience, a three-day festival of good food, skiing and partying.
The association of top-class food with snow sports is a no-brainer: what better way to work up an appetite than whizzing down a mountain? And Italians do love their food, so there were no shortage of takers for the gala lunches, dinners and parties at the Chef’s Cup. Once you’ve got your ticket, there are no VIP areas and you have full access to the participating chefs.
So you might find yourself, as I did, queuing for a bowl of risotto alongside a well known chef, such as Francesco Mazzei, until recently head chef at L'Anima in London, or discussing the relative merits of baby onions with Graham Neville, head chef at Restaurant Forty One in Dublin.
However, celebrity chef watchers hoping to meet Massimo Bottura, of three-star Osteria Francescana in Modena, were to be disappointed as the chef was a last-minute non-runner, due to "an unforeseen hindrance", as the organisers described it.
Graham Neville was invited by San Pellegrino to take part in a lunchtime “show cooking” event at which five chefs would present a dish each to hungry guests, fresh off the pistes. His dish was Dinish Island scallops with lemon puree and juniper emulsion, and he was to cook and serve 200 portions of it to invited guests, and customers who had parted with €150 to attend.
The perishables needed for the dish were sent by courier, but five huge bags of those aforementioned French baby onions accompanied the Irish contingent – Garrett Lynch of Stafford Lynch, distributor of San Pellegrino in Ireland, and Charlie Sheil, general manager of the Marker Hotel and unofficial chef d'équipe of the Irish team – all the way from Dublin airport.
Two flights, an airport transfer dash, and a white-knuckle mountain drive with an Audi test driver who knew the meaning of “owning the road”, and team Ireland arrived at the pretty village of San Cassiano.
Starting early the next morning in the kitchens of Chiasa Salares Hotel, which was hosting the lunch, Graham Neville and his two assistants got to work on the scallops dish, which had been on his restaurant menu in September but was being plated in a slightly simplified manner this time.
"The scallops, pan-fried for less than two minutes, were sprayed with lemon, using an atomiser to finish," he said. "I juiced one fresh unwaxed lemon, set it with agar and blended it to make a thick puree or a fluid gel. Small garden onions were blanched in stock and finished a la plancha. The juniper sauce was made of scallop coral stock, reduced into a sauce and flavoured with juniper berries.
“So in the end we had a sweet scallop, dry/bitter juniper sauce, sour lemon puree and baby onions with a slightly acrid, round flavour – a play on gin and tonic.”
Not surprisingly, the Irish dish went down a treat, selling out in record time.
“We have some of the best fish products in the world. Everybody loved it, and we had a lot of positive comments back. Even with my lack of Italian, I could sense that people really enjoyed it,” Neville said.
The finale to this year's Chef's Cup was a lavish event back in the tented village, where another group of chefs had with an opportunity to impress with their creativity. Much attention centred on Sergey and Ivan Berezutskiy, of Twins Restaurant in Moscow. The brothers are identical twins, hence the name of their restaurant; however, Graham Neville's assertion that they previously worked at a restaurant where you had to be a twin to gain employment has been impossible to verify.
But there was no doubting the impression made by one of their restaurant’s signature dishes, transported to the Alps for the occasion. Letter From Russia was a brown paper envelope, sealed with wax, containing a mixture of scallops, pineapple guava and couscous, with a pesto made from herbs. It was a crowd-pleaser, but not the dish of the night, according to Graham Neville.
“Edin Dzemat, from Linnéa Art Restaurant, in Gothenburg, cooked lamb sweetbreads with truffled celeriac. It tasted amazing. I’m definitely going to steal it . . . well, not steal, but take inspiration from that,” said the Irish chef, convincing me to eat sweetbreads for the first, though hopefully not the last, time.
