First Person: Jim Denevan

Chef Jim Denevan’s mission is to showcase great ingredients in 'the most beautiful locations'

I became a chef partly because it left days free for surfing – I grew up in California and in the 1980s I was a serious surfer. Back then, when restaurants ordered ingredients, they just called up a big company which sent a truck round; you had no idea where the products came from. But I started going to farmers’ markets and devising menus according to what was in season and, before long, farmers and foragers were appearing at my door with fresh ingredients.

I loved hearing the farmers’ stories, and I started to think how great it would be to give diners more of a sense of where their dinner began. So I organised a series of meals at Gabriella Café in Santa Cruz, to which I would invite a farmer and his family. The farmer just had to stand up at some point and talk about what he grew or raised.

It was about this time that I started drawing. One day, walking along the beach, the light hitting the sand was really inspiring, so I drew a 15ft fish with my finger. I was struck by the power of making something so big that would disappear almost immediately. I became obsessed: I’d leave for work at the restaurant and see all these wonderful places on the way and turn up late with a trail of sand drawings behind me. I even stopped surfing.

Since then, I have found a way to combine my two passions – food and art – although I no longer work in a conventional restaurant. Since 1999, instead of bringing the farmer to dinner, we’ve been taking dinner to the farm. We call them Outstanding in the Field dinners (outstandinginthefield.com), as the point is to showcase the best products and the people who nurture them. For a chef, ingredients are what make the job fascinating and I want to share that, in the most beautiful locations I can find. To me, these dinners are also works of art. But it’s a little rude to say you’re coming to my art installation. It’s much more convivial to say we’re having dinner together.

We only hold dinners in summer anyway, and since the California winter is ideal for my art, the balance works pretty well. However, now I’m getting art commissions in far-flung places, it’s becoming more difficult.

It’s good for people to be brought closer to the land. We have set up our long table in rooftop gardens, on mountains, on an isthmus you can only reach at low tide. If the weather looks bad we find an indoors venue, or build a shelter.

We’ve done more than 300 dinners now. These days, chefs from the area do the actual cooking. Some of the ingredients will have been grown inches from the table. We normally have 120 to 140 people at our long table, which we carry with us – it’s very flexible, it can curve or be elevated at different points. Guests are encouraged to bring their own plates though: it’s their creative contribution.

The biggest dinner we’ve done was in Brenham, Texas, with the table winding round the hilltop and a view for miles. The farmer wanted to break our record, so we had 207 people. It’s not the first record I’ve broken: I’m in Guinness World Records for the world’s largest artwork, a series of circles etched in the sand of Black Rock Desert, Nevada, that was nine miles in circumference. But I’ve broken that record too, in Siberia last year, with an ice drawing about the size of Paris. There are photographs of it taken from a satellite.

Now, for the first time, we’ve decided to take our little red bus to Europe. We’re holding dinners in locations including Ireland, Wales and Spain. I’ll also be making art in Swansea and in Spain. Creating an artwork on the beach at Swansea is just something I want to do – they have great low tides. I’ll probably hire a helicopter and get some good shots.

Am I sad when an artwork I’ve spent hours or days on disappears? No. It’s the act of composition that interests me. It’s like the dinners: each is an unrepeatable experience. Which is what life is, really.