Farm-to-table trailblazer Jim Denevan returns to his roots with a dinner on Capitola Wharf

On Wednesday, a 175-foot table draped in white cloth stretched down the center of the Capitola Wharf and drew curious looks from the fishers, dog walkers and teens piled onto beach cruisers that passed by the unusual scene. Light glinted off wine glasses and mismatched plates at nearly 200 place settings while pelicans dove into the water and Capitola Village shone in its idyllic glory on the shore. 

Wearing his trademark cowboy hat, wine glass in hand, Outstanding in the Field founder Jim Denevan stood in front of the crowd of people who had each paid $385 to feast on tender Miyagi oysters, craft beer-battered halibut with spring pea tartar sauce and wonton shells filled with bigeye tuna poke, and reflected on the traveling farm-to-table event company he founded more than 20 years ago.

It was a historic moment both for the wharf – newly rebuilt after being ripped in half by a storm surge more than two years earlier – and for Denevan.

Now in his early 60s, Denevan spent his teenage years living and surfing in Pleasure Point, and still lives in the neighborhood, less than a mile from the Capitola Wharf. He has childhood memories playing on the Capitola beach with his brothers – he’s the second-youngest of eight children – and taking his own son fishing on the wharf. On Wednesday, he told the crowd: “After visiting all 50 states and now 25 countries, we’ve returned to the closest location to my house.”

The first three events were held in 1999, at Mariquita Farm in Corralitos, at his brother Bill Denevan’s apple orchard Happy Valley Farm in Santa Cruz, and at Happy Boy Farms in Watsonville. Two and a half decades later, the sold-out event on the Capitola Wharf made a breathtaking overture to Outstanding in the Field’s 24th season. This year, Denevan’s moveable feast will visit 60 farms, wineries and ranches throughout the United States through November, plus an international event at an organic rice farm in Tuscany. 

What began in the ’90s as an inspired but rather harebrained idea to get people to connect with their food systems evolved into a cultural phenomenon that helped pioneer the farm-to-table movement. Through years of financial struggles and more than one humbling interaction with the great outdoors, Denevan’s vision proved prescient. Today, his company hosts 60 to 70 events annually, commanding around $400 per ticket. The success is a testament to Denevan’s unwavering belief that people would pay premium prices for authentic connections to their food’s origins, even – maybe, especially – if that meant dining in cow pastures or on wind-swept beaches instead of restaurants. 

For the event on the wharf, three local chefs – Nick Sherman of Trestles in Capitola, Jessica Yarr of The Grove Café & Bakery in Felton and Kendra Baker, co-owner of The Penny Ice Creamery – prepared the meal, which highlighted seafood provided by Santa Cruz fish market H&H Fresh Fish Co. The main courses were served family style: an umami-packed kale salad with slick seaweed harvested from Monterey Bay, rich and earthy; sunny saffron aioli melted like an egg yolk into bouillabaisse packed with shellfish, lingcod and squid; and grilled halibut with chorizo and farro, with a side of first-of-the-season tomatoes dressed with a garlicky ramp pesto. 

Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, a local nonprofit that supports Monterey Bay’s fishing economy and healthy oceans, co-hosted the event, while beverage makers from Ser Winery, Venus Spirits and Santa Cruz Cider Company made sure all of the glasses were full. 

This season opener on the wharf and a second event this weekend in Corralitos hold special significance to Denevan.

On Saturday, for the first time in 26 years, Outstanding in the Field will return to Mariquita Farm, where Denevan held his first feast in 1999. Since then, Denevan has taken his roving table to locations that range from agricultural to adventurous: a dairy farm in Pennsylvania; a hidden coastal cove; a 1,000-person meal at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena; and a winery at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan. But, by little twists of fate, this Saturday will be the first time back at Mariquita, this time with chef Gus Trejo of the Jack O’Neill Restaurant & Lounge at the Dream Inn in Santa Cruz at the helm.

A week earlier, Denevan sat on a stump at the center of a labyrinth at Mariquita Farm, the swirling pattern created by tufts of lavender, and gazed over the next ridge. The site of the first dinner was just a few hundred yards away, in an empty plot of land behind a swaying grove of eucalyptus. Today, the original field is inaccessible from the farm, a fact that makes Denevan reflective about how much time has passed: “You can see where the first dinner was, the lights and the green, but, in the poetic sense, you can’t get there.” 

Mariquita farmer Andy Griffin doesn’t lease that land anymore, and a ravine filled with blackberries makes walking from the current farm impossible. This time, the dinner will be held along the gravel drive of the bucolic idyll, surrounded by late-spring flowers and overlooking the labyrinth. Nevertheless, Denevan drove me the long way around to stand in the original space, now overgrown with tall grasses nearly as high as his well-over-6-foot frame, to try to gaze into the past. 

His recollections were meandering and unhurried, punctuated with poignant anecdotes. The photos that exist of that day are “terrible,” he admits with a laugh; in an attempt to cultivate an air of mystery, he declined to have a professional photographer on site at the first feast. Around 60 people – at least half of them friends and family posing as paid guests – dined near a greenhouse surrounded by tomatoes and gladiolas. Denevan, who was the head chef at Gabriella Café in Santa Cruz in the mid-’90s, and Tom King, the chef at the now-long-gone Seabright restaurant Papa’s Church, roasted a pig in the ground using rocks from a nearby creek and accompanied by organic produce from Griffin’s farm. 

Sitting at a single family-style table was a new concept at the time, and one that Denevan had to defend to skeptics in the early days of the feasts who said people wouldn’t want to sit next to strangers. It turned out to be one of the most vital components of the gatherings because of how it encourages community and camaraderie. It’s also visually striking.

“I wanted this extremely minimal blank slate, so the food is what’s different from place to place, and the tables are exactly the same,” he said. Denevan’s awareness of space and how it can be manipulated to emotional affect is a skill showcased in his other life as a land artist. Using beaches and desert landscapes as his canvas, he has gained international renown for mesmerizing designs raked into sand, only to be washed away by the tide or an afternoon breeze. 

At other feasts, he has led guests a mile through organic farm fields and orchards to emerge at a tree-lined creek. At beach events, he’s known to lay the long table so the rising tide might tickle the feet of the diners closest to the water – without, hopefully, pulling them into the surf. 

In those early days, he knew that throwing dinner parties on agricultural land with farmers as the guests of honor was groundbreaking. He saw a new cultural awareness of chefs and food production, and believed that his storytelling would resonate. “I thought, these kinds of stories will be written because food, farming and chefs are bubbling up in the public’s consciousness. So I’ll be the first,” said Denevan.

Despite a strong belief in its purpose, it took years before Outstanding in the Field gained traction. For almost a decade, Denevan traveled the country in a red-and-white 1953 Flxible bus named Outstanding, setting up tables in dramatic locales with a ragtag staff, led at the time by director Katy Oursler, now of Mutari Chocolate. He charged over $150 per plate – an enormous fee at the time – but struggled to stay afloat financially. A 2005 article in The New York Times Magazine that was supposed to be his big break nearly ruined him when the story painted a less than flattering picture of Denevan; author Kim Severson called him “a lost little boy looking for solace in sand castles and peanut-butter sandwiches.”

In 2007, Outstanding in the Field finally got a big break when CBS’ Sunday morning show produced a feature on the feasts and Denevan, describing him as “an artist of the ephemeral.” “After that, every event sold out. We went from doing 16 events to nearly 40 events,” said Denevan. The following year, an article on Denevan titled “The Wandering Chef” in GQ magazine won a James Beard Award. 

The price of a ticket to an Outstanding in the Field dinner has always been high compared to other farm-to-table events. This year, most tickets cost around $400 per person. Despite receiving angry letters from critics who accuse him of being elitist, Denevan defended the decision. The price reflects the cost to support the farmers and event logistics, and goes towards subsidized tickets for the farmers and other hosts to attend as guests with their families, he said.

“I was really against the idea of farmers being considered charity cases, since my brother is a farmer. I was thinking, pay them the damn money for the produce. Pay for the site. Pay for the wine – pay for everything,” he said. “If the culture values it, pay for it.”

Each Outstanding in the Field event offers novelty, a deeper connection to food and, hopefully, a great meal. But what makes these feasts powerful isn’t their luxury. If it’s comfort guests are after, they’ll find far more in a dining room at a Michelin-starred restaurant than at a dinner in an urban farm or a remote mountaintop. 

Denevan aims to, if not rock his guests’ foundations, at least wiggle them a little bit. In fact, his favorite events are the ones that go “off the rails.” 

One of his most powerful events was also one of the most traumatizing. An event in Big Sur promised guests stunning panoramic views from the top of a mountain that could be reached only by a winding road that clung to the side of the hill. On the day of the feast, the ridge was completely socked in with fog, and by the time the guests had climbed from the coast to the 2,000-foot elevation, they were visibly shaken by the harrowing shuttle ride. Three different parties demanded to be taken back down. 

“They’re genuinely terrified going up the steep road and into a cloud, and they can’t see anything,” he said. “I had to tell the group, ‘You see where the grass has been stepped on? Walk where you see the grass has been stepped on, and you can get a beverage over there.'”

It was windy and freezing, and demands of refunds seemed imminent. But after the second course, the fog began to lift. Suddenly the view appeared, and it was calm, sunny and warm. “There was a transcendent experience for the guests, where they were just in awe of this place,” said Denevan. “It makes me cry a little bit that the possibilities when things will go very wrong are simultaneously the possibilities when they’ll go really right.”

The sun shone brightly on Denevan at the Capitola Wharf on Wednesday, as he toasted the many people that made the event possible. Over 26 years, the message of the feasts hasn’t changed: “The theme was to get out to the places where the food comes from, hear from the folks that are out there on the sea, on the land, living it day to day and bringing food to the table.”

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