Someone in your group got handed the job of finding a chef. It was you. You have a house in Vail for six nights, ten or twelve people coming, one dinner that matters more than the others, and a browser full of tabs that all say the same three things. Customized menus. Fresh local ingredients. Personalized service.
Here is the part nobody tells you about booking a chef in Vail. Most of the time you are not choosing a person. You are choosing a company that will choose a person for you, and you meet that person when he walks through the door with his knives.
Chef Chris Mitchum works the other way. You book him. He shows up. That is the whole model, and for a house in Vail it changes more than it sounds like it should.
Search the phrase and you get three kinds of results, and they blur together after the second one.
There are the marketplaces, where you submit a request and get matched. There are the placement agencies that staff chefs across every ski resort in Colorado. And there are the property management referrals, where the house you rented hands you a name because that name is on their list.
All three sell you a chef. None of them sell you *this* chef. The person who cooks your dinner is an output of the system, and if he is good, that was luck.
Chris is one man with a name on the door and three decades of professional kitchens behind it. He trained at the Culinary Institute of America. He is certified by the Court of Master Sommeliers. Those two credentials in one human being are rare, and they matter more than they look on a list, because the person pouring your wine is the person who cooked the thing it is meant to go with.
Most operations solve wine by handing you a list, or by asking what you like and bringing something that matches the color. When the chef holds the certification himself, the wine stops being an add-on and becomes part of the cooking.
Over a six-night stay that compounds. The second dinner can answer the first. A bottle opened on Tuesday can set up what lands on Friday. One person plans the arc, which is not possible when the menu comes from a chef and the wine comes from whoever the house uses.
If you have used a placement service, you know the feeling of the week before the trip, when you still do not know who is coming. Roster models cannot promise you a specific person, because their whole business is coverage.
Chris cannot cover every house in the valley. He can be the same chef every night of your stay, and the same chef next season, which is what second-home owners in this corridor tend to want once they have tried both. The people who “just have a guy” have a guy for a reason.
This is the honest version, and Chris insists on it. Three decades in professional kitchens. Six years living and cooking in this corridor. He is not going to tell you he grew up here.
What thirty years buys you is not local trivia. It is a chef who has cooked a hundred versions of the week you are about to have, and who knows what goes wrong in a rental kitchen at 7:40 on the night everyone came off the mountain late. Six years here is enough to have the purveyors and the wine reps, and Chris works the Vail Valley as much as he works Aspen and Snowmass.
Vail fills up in ways Aspen does not, and the model was built for the difference.
Because chef, wine, and luxury transportation come from the same operation, a Vail trip does not turn into three vendors and a spreadsheet. It turns into one phone number.
You send your dates, your headcount, the kitchen you are in, and anything the table cannot eat. Chris plans the dinners and the wine together, sources them, arrives, cooks in your space, serves your group, and leaves the kitchen the way he found it. If transportation is part of the trip, the same operation handles it.
Nobody in your group is managing anything. That is the product.
The person plating the dish is the person who chose what goes in the glass beside it.
Vail books early, and the weeks worth having go first. Holidays and Presidents Day fill months out.
If you have dates in mind and you want a chef and sommelier who arrives as one person, start here.
Yes. Chris works the Aspen and Vail corridor. His home base is Basalt, and the operation travels with him, chef, wine, and transportation from one provider.
Yes. Chris trained at the Culinary Institute of America and is certified by the Court of Master Sommeliers. The person cooking your dinner designed the wine to go with it. Most operations split those two jobs between two people, or skip the second one.
Yes. A private dinner is often the part of an offsite people remember, and the credentials hold up when you have to justify the choice to the person signing off on it.
Yes. You are booking Chris, not a roster. That is the difference between this and a placement service, and it is the reason repeat clients stay with him season to season.
One provider for the chef, the wine, and luxury transportation. One point of contact for the trip instead of three vendors who have never spoken to each other.
Sooner than feels necessary. Holiday weeks and Presidents Day go first, and Chris takes a limited number of bookings because he cooks all of them himself.
