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FeedMeet the chef: Mark Shoup from Sundance's Tree Room
Last spring, the sun was shining as the snow was melting when I talked to Mark Shoup, chef of the Tree Room at Sundance Resort.
“The change of season makes me hungry,” he said. “In the spring, you can taste favas, morels and asparagus in the air.” Then, Shoup was about to introduce his new spring menu, featuring these flavors alongside a few cold-weather holdovers. Now, as summer reaches its peak, he’s making changes again. “There’s just no point in putting fresh corn and tomatoes on the menu until midsummer,” he says.
Such sensitivity to the seasons is essential to Shoup’s food philosophy: “I believe the food should taste like itself. The garnishes and sauces should complement the main food’s flavor, not compete with it.”
That simple approach runs counter to the prevailing style at many resort and upscale restaurants, where nothing succeeds like excess and an entrée with fewer than three garnishes looks naked on the plate. But simplicity, Shoup believes, requires excellence. If the ingredients aren’t perfect, they can’t stand on their own. And ingredients are at their best in the right season.
Shoup developed his cooking style over the last 15 years. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, in 1999, and has worked in a wide diversity of places before and since, from Flint, Michigan, to Frankfurt, Germany, from a Mississippi riverboat to a Palm Beach hotel. His career is rooted in a love of the kitchen. “I had always worked in restaurants,” he says. “I made a misguided attempt to study engineering, but I went back to cooking. I love the energy of the kitchen. Very few jobs promote that feeling.”
Shoup’s culinary ideas coincide happily with the Sundance mission. “Sundance is really about nurturing creativity, the arts and the environment,” says Shoup. “That’s what makes this more than a seasonal resort.”
And that’s how the Sundance Food and Wine Festival was born.
“The Festival is an outgrowth of Sundance’s Celebrating Wine as Art program,” says Lucy Ridolphi, Sundance’s marketing manager. Beginning in 2004, Sundance has worked with vintners who share the spirit of Sundance—they are independent voices, they ’re committed to stewardship of the land and have a passion for their art.
The Food and Wine Festival was conceived as a way to share the spirit of this art form with the community, and to showcase the Sundance restaurants and other leading Utah restaurants. The result is an idyllic spread of wine, food and beer served up by Utah restaurants and artisan food producers, in an alpine meadow at the base of Sundance Mountain.
Buzz about the event has spread quickly and last year, its third, the festival sold out immediately. “People had high expectations, because of Sundance’s reputation,” says Shoup. And the event delivered.
Chef Shoup arrived at Sundance just before the festival last year and served an ambitious wild game tortellini. “We did everything by hand,” he says. “We braised the meat for hours, then pounded it almost to a paste and added the reduced broth back in to make the flavor really intense. Then we folded in dried cherries, roasted fennel and wild mushrooms.” The dish was one of the big hits of the festival and a perfect example of the artisanal philosophy that Sundance was founded to support.
At Sundance, passion for the kitchen arts is revered right along with cinema and visual arts, and an independent palate as encouraged as an independent voice or point of view.
Sundance Resort, 801-223-4200
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