Jackson Is A Booming Market For Mile High Chef And His High-End Mobile Kitchen

When mountains and blue sky are the dining room walls, steaks just taste better. 

That’s what Mile High Chef Steve Ingber’s customers tell him, anyway. 

The Culinary Institute of America-trained chef offers a mobile business cooking for people in the wildest of Rocky Mountain spaces over a four-state area that includes Wyoming. Jackson Hole is his fastest growing market, but he has cooked in locations from majestic and grand to humble, gulch and gully, too. 

Take, for example, a ranch wedding for 124 in a remote area with no electricity, just outside of Canon City at the base of the Colorado Rockies. This might sound like a problem for ordinary chefs, but for Ingber it’s just Tuesday. 

“There was no kitchen on site so we built one on folding tables,” said Ingber, who is based in Denver. “We’ve done remote cooking over campfires all the time, too. Cast iron and grates over the fire for the steaks and anything that wants to smoke.”

Propane burners and portable induction units work for sauces and any finer work, and then chafers with sterno keep everything piping hot until it’s all ready to come together and be served.

Coolers full of ice keep everything that’s raw cold and fresh. Spare tanks and folding prep tables come out of the van for a little slice and dice.

Starting prices for these gourmet cookouts in the wild where a simple sandwich at sunset won’t do? 

It’s $1,500, but has ranged as high as $42,000 for 45 guests over four days during Cheyenne Frontier Days. 

The latter’s kitchen facility was only designed for continental breakfasts, so it doesn’t even have a stove. 

“They want us to cook for 200, 300 people a day,” Ingber said. “Gourmet meals, plated dishes, everything like formal settings. I mean, they hosted the governor. The governor of Wyoming has come through a few times. So it’s just one of those where you’ve gotta make magic out of nothing.”

The rest of the year, it’s mostly rental houses and vacations in mountain towns, Ingber added. But sometimes it’s dinner under the Tetons with ranch steaks on the grill and truffles flown in from Europe, or it’s exotic camel meat and milk flown in from the Middle East, or it’s sushi made from the freshest possible fish flown in from the sea.

Because hot dogs or bologna or even a turkey avocado on rye isn’t what his class of customers want to eat while they watch the sun set over the Tetons. 

Mom Was His First Customer

Although it’s pretty high-end stuff today, Ingber’s start is much humbler.

“My mom was the one who raised me by herself, and she was always working late nights,” Ingber said. “So I was the one who was putting out dinner. Or if we had family or friends coming over, I was the one who was like, ‘Let me go to the store and figure out how to put together a meal.'”

Ingber laughs thinking about some of those early dinners compared to what he does now.

“Now were those meals any good back then?” he said. “Probably not.”

But as he grew older, his skills grew too, as did his ambitions in the kitchen.

“All throughout college and post-grad, I’d cook for those special people in my life or special someones,” he said. “I was just like the rest of the millions of other people who watch Food Network and kind of leave it there.”

From C-Suite To Camp Stove

For his career, Ingber pursued marketing in corporate America for brands Budweiser, Bud Light, Fan Duel, and Gymshark, which is a sports apparel company. 

“I was always working on, like, brand marketing and partnerships,” he said. “So very corporate marketing roles. I achieved I guess a top level of C-suite and then I worked my way up to chief marketing officer at a smaller company.”

After the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Ingber found himself getting paid to “sit on my butt.”

“I was living in Los Angeles at the time and there’s a very famous culinary program on the East Coast called the CIA, Culinary Institute of America,” he said. “They have a campus in the Napa Valley.”

His birthday was coming up and he noticed there was an abbreviated cooking class he could sign up for without having to pursue a Bachelor or Associates of this or that.

“I’m like well, I can just get my culinary degree for fun,” he said. “Because I’m just kind of sitting home.”

COVID canceled the class, but eventually Ingber was able to work out a deal with his new boss in Colorado, allowing him to work remotely and finally take advantage of his birthday gift to himself.

“A year passes, and I went through a bad breakup as any guy in his 30s does, and I was sitting on the couch, and my mom was like, ‘You should just put up a Yelp ad and offer to cook for people.’”

Mom Turns Out To Be Right

At first Ingber thought his mom was nuts. 

“Like the people who are offering to do catering or private chef events, they’re from the best pedigree and they’ve earned their spot,” he recalled telling her. “And then she’s like, ‘Just do it.’”

Ingber did, just to show her that he was right.

“I’m like, ‘All right, no one’s ever going to respond to me on Yelp, of all places,” he recalled saying. “But this was one of those times where, as much as I love to fist and tooth with my mom at times and prove her wrong, she was right in this instance.”

The next day as he was getting out of the shower, Ingber found his phone ringing off the hook.

“This lady’s calling me from downtown Denver and she’s like, ‘Hey, I’m looking to cater my Thanksgiving and I can’t find anyone. Can you do it?’” Ingber said. “And I was like, ‘How did you find me?’”

The answer was that crazy Yelp ad he’d placed, just to show his mom.

“So I botched that job,” he said. “I probably underpriced it. I delivered it incorrectly. I made every mistake on that job. But here we are four years later. I ended up quitting my corporate job to do this full time.”

Mountain Chef Business

Quitting the corporate job to go full-time was its own learning curve. Ingber quickly realized that to scale up he was going to have to think about his business model differently. It couldn’t just be him doing the cooking. He needed more chefs over a wider territory.

“So that’s kind of where Mile High Cook was born in terms of like providing this multi regional resort/vacation like lifestyle service to folks who, whether it’s a family ski vacation, a backyard wedding, some large corporate event, or a camping trip,” he said. “Just all these different things have popped up for these occasions of needing a chef.”

Part of the shift, Ingber says, is social media which has helped him sell the idea that one needn’t hire a chef to cook for them full-time to have the experience for a special occasion. 

“At one time, it was for the ultra 1% of wealth,” he said. “Like your athletes, your celebrity entertainers. But now you’re getting people who are like, they own an investment firm or they’re a successful doctor or writer or whatever that might be. They don’t need a private chef full-time, they need it a few times a month.”

Ingber’s customers have been everything from small parties to people with specific allergies or dietary restrictions in markets that can’t access groceries as easily. 

“So I think this has just become more accessible,” he said. “But also the dynamics of the restaurant and hospitality industry have changed.”

What’s Driving This Trend

Restaurants are having a harder time staying open amid inflation for both ingredients and labor. Meanwhile, many people discovered during the pandemic they actually preferred eating their restaurant-prepared meals at home. They’re not as interested in going out for a fine-dining experience any more.

They’d rather have it at home.

“For some people, when you compare this to going to a (three-star) Michelin restaurant and hiring a baby sitter and all the back and forth that’s required,” Ingber said. “They’re just like, I’m going to invite six of my good friends over and hire a private chef. That way we don’t have to hire the babysitter. The kids are asleep upstairs and we just brought the experience to our house.”

Wyoming, Ingber added, is his favorite state to do this in.

“It’s very business-friendly and hospitality-friendly in terms of allowing private chefs to operate without all these different hurdles and hoops,” he said. “In Colorado, you have to have a catering license and this license and that insurance. It’s much more affordable for someone to start up a business in Wyoming than the other states like Colorado and Arizona that I operate in.”

Jackson Is Ground Zero

Jackson is so far Ingber’s fastest growing market, which he said is a mix of tourists and people who own second homes. Other fast-growing markets are in Idaho and Montana, both of which have a wave of wealthy migrants moving in.

“I also do a lot of smaller weddings,” he said. “Micro weddings are a huge trend right now.”

The way it works, Ingber said, is people will book a really beautiful Airbnb or VRBO and pay a little extra to use it as an event space. 

“They’ll set up a tent and the kitchens are usually so big I can easily cook for 40, 50, 60 people,” he said. “Or I’ll just bring the necessary equipment to kind of fill in the gaps and it’s almost like running it at a beautiful event center.”

These days, Ingber doesn’t advertise on Yelp anymore. He was right that it wasn’t the best venue for his target clientele, but it did give him the critical momentum he needed to start a business that fits his temperament better than the C-suite ever did.

“I don’t think the caliber of client that I’m looking for really hangs out there,” he said. “But you have to start somewhere. You’ve got to make the mistakes to land where you need to.”

For Ingber, that humble, imperfect first ad was better than standing still. It was a spark that lit the fire, and everything since has been refining his strategy. 

Thanks to that, he’s had adventures along the way, taking his business into some of Wyoming’s most luxurious homes and outdoor spaces. It’s exactly what he was hoping for when he began, even if the start wasn’t perfect.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.