Eat Chic: Inside The World's Most Epic Food Festival

There are food festivals—and then there's The Epicure-Days of Culinary Masterpieces, an annual four-day gourmet festival in Zurich where the chefs cumulatively boast twenty-one Michelin stars. (Fun fact: four of the chefs have three Michelin stars each.)

Created and led by two-Michelin starred chef Heiko Neider, head chef at Zurich's ridiculously luxurious five-star The Dolder Grand hotel (itself an icon and a favorite stay of everybody from Oprah to Gwyneth Paltrow to Mick Jagger to Bill Clinton), The Epicure is head and shoulders above any other food festival in the world in terms of sheer jaw-dropping fabulosity.

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Each year, the roster changes—past chefs have included 3-Michelin-starred chefs Quique Dacosta from Spain, Gert De Mangeleer from Belgium and Christian Bau from Germany—and this year in Zurich, the line-up was no less awe-inspiring. Three-Michelin-starred chefs on-board included Pascal Barbot of L'Astrance in Paris, Andreas Caminada of Schauenstein Schloss Restaurant Hotel in Fürstenau, Switzerland, Curtis Duffy of Chicago's celebrated Grace restaurant, and Harald Wohlfahrt of Germany's Restaurant Schwarzwaldstube, where he has maintained three-Michelin stars for 23 years.

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Other chefs—with "only" two Michelin-stars—included Yoshinori Ishii from Umu in London, Georgianna Hiliadaki and Nikos Roussos from Funky Gourmet in Athens, Anthony Genovese fromIl Pagliaccio in Rome, and Søren Selin from AOC in Copenhagen. In total, eleven chefs from Switzerland, Spain, France, Germany, UK, Greece, Italy, Belgium, and (for the first time with Duffy) the United States were represented.

Now, obviously the point of a food festival is to wander around and stuff your face with as much delicious grub as possible—but at The Epicure, you feel intimidated into refinement. The food is just so pretty. It almost felt like a crime to eat it (and yet, somehow, I found the strength from within.) In the Dolder's two-story Steinhalle gallery, each chef selects a dish to present to guests at The Final: everything from delicate flower-covered fish "sticks" at AOC's station, to "pizza" at Funky Gourmet (which consisted of dried fish noodles and lime covered with white chocolate), to langoustines at L'Astrance. The world's best bartender (with the awards to prove it) Eric Lorincz of London's Bar Americain at The Savoy was there, too, slinging drinks and mixing cocktails in the back garden, his white tie tuxedo remaining immaculately crisp.

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One of the best parts of the festival—other than the seemingly endless bounty of impossibly artful dishes—was to see how excited the chefs themselves were seeing each other at work. As the crowds wound down, the chefs started abandoning their stations and wandering over to their neighboring tables, giving each other kudos about the beauty of the dishes.

All weekend, there are culinary sideshows: so-called Masterclasses in everything from cocktails to whiskey to cigars, letting guests get up and close with the award-winning talent in stations all over the beautiful Dolder. I chose the cocktail Masterclass—because why wouldn't you want to learn how to make The Savoy's iconic Hanky Panky cocktail from the world's best bartender?—and gathered with about nine other guests in the Dolder's dimly-lit "Harry Potter bar" (so nicknamed because of its candles hanging suspended from the ceiling, as if by magic) as Lorincz gave us his tips and tricks of the trade.

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Source: Eat Chic: Inside The World's Most Epic Food Festival