Every series has to start somewhere. Our TRAIL FEAST X BENCHMADE KNIFE COMPANY “Wilderness Dinner Series” started on a dried-up lake bed in southeastern Oregon.
For the first stop of three Fires, guests didn't get an address. They got a Benchmade Bugout knife with GPS coordinates engraved on it, and those numbers led them out onto the Alvord Desert for three days and two nights of eating under the open sky. No walls, no ceiling, no menu board. Just cracked, flat ground in every direction, mountains on the horizon, and a kitchen we hauled in ourselves.
Why we cook out here
People ask how Trail Feast started, and the honest answer is it started with a name that was already taken. I'd been catering for a while, and the folks I cooked for kept telling me the same thing: do more high-end dinners. They couldn't figure out how what they'd just eaten came off a campfire.
So that's what this is. You can go to any restaurant and sit inside four walls. We'd rather get you outside and take you on the whole trip, not just the meal but the road to it. At the table we talk about what we found along the way, why it's on your plate, and why we do it differently.
The kitchen
"Five-star kitchen in the middle of the desert" sounds like a stretch until you see it. A whole lamb from Your Friends Farm hung splayed on an wood cross beside the fire, going slow and dark while the rigs sat parked behind it. The Gozney ovens turned out roasted oysters, bubbling in the shell. The iron grills handled the rest, with Spiceology on just about everything.
Then came the course people are still talking about: Manzo beef tartare, served in a split marrow bone like a little canoe. Once the tartare was gone, the bone wasn't done. We torched it and poured Punt e Mes down the marrow channel for a bone luge, and one by one the table took their turn. Smoke rolled out from under a cloche, small bites went around beside cold drinks, and the sun dropped behind the mountains.
Not everything came off a grate. Out by the rigs, with rock bluffs behind us, I sabered a bottle of bubbles over a bowl of oysters while the flutes waited in a row. And as the light went purple, a torch finished one more course right in front of the table.
The people
Twenty-four guests made it out to the playa. Plenty of bites never made it to a plate. I handed them over straight off the fire to whoever was standing closest. After dark, the camp lit up under the Trail Feast canopy, and the fire kept people at the table long after the last course.
That's the part we can't plan. Like I say in the film: differences are set aside, people are breaking bread, and they're learning something new.
What the first fire taught us
The first one is always the one you learn the most from. The desert doesn't forgive you for showing up unprepared, and we found that out fast. We underestimated the Alvord and how little it gives you to work with. Every bit of water, shade and fuel was whatever we'd hauled in. We worked through it and still put every course on the table, and those lessons went into the truck with us for every stop that came after.
The crew behind it
Emily Dresser — Do Yoga Outside, Kiefer Jones, Dustin Ronspies, Patrick Dahms and Chad White — Trail Feast, Tom Schaller, Mike Filander — Benchmade Knife Company, Clint Easley and Teddy Meisel —Revol Entertainment who spent the weekend behind the camera and caught the parts we were too busy cooking to see.
None of this gets out to a dry lake bed without our partners: Benchmade, Toyo Tires, Black Rhino Wheels, Rhino-Rack, ARB, Baja Designs, Xtrusion Overland, Gozney, Traeger, Solo Stove, Breeo, Spiceology, Off the Grid Surplus, JK Boots, and Your Friends Farm. Thank you.
Keep reading
Oregon lit the first fire. See how the series carried on in Montana and Washington.
