At 855 Meters: The Master Chef Who Rides To Work Through The Clouds
The gondola door closes. The valley drops away. Ten quiet minutes later, Executive Chef Vinnie Hill steps off into a kitchen with a skyline. “Not a bad office, eh?” He means the Howe Sound laid out like a map, the light that changes by the hour, and the service that starts when the first gondola cabins arrive. “The commute is beautiful. I tell you, every day, riding up, the scenery never gets old.”
Ten years ago, Vinnie came to British Columbia for the mountains. Whistler was first, then Squamish. The move was life, not strategy. He cooked his way from Dusty’s to Christine’s to the Executive Chef role at Whistler Blackcomb, learning scale, systems and restraint along the way. When the ownership team at Sea to the Sea to Sky Gondola called, the pitch was simple. “Do whatever you want. Take it for a run, have some fun.”
For Vinnie and many guests mornings begin in the Summit Lodge café at nine. The food is fast, honest and built for people who earned their appetite. Breakfast sandwiches, parfaits, hot hash browns. Then a pivot. Lunch switches to grilled cheeses — “sexy” grilled cheeses. it’s a five-cheese number that hits the table oozy and loud. The perfect kind of mountain food that makes a hike feel shorter on the way down.
The backyard is for families. Games on the grass, kids on the climbing frames, burgers by the window. “Smash patty, crispy outside, nice and moist in the middle,” Vinnie keeps it tight on purpose: house sauce, house pickles, lettuce, tomato, bun. “Just serve with fries, it comes as it comes” says Vinnie, professing the simplicity behind this crowd pleaser.
Inside, the team plays with dough and sugar. Donuts rotate without warning, which is the point. “I never know what they’re going to be,” Vinnie says, because the cooks and café crew take turns riffing on fillings and finishes. The kitchen is a classroom. The menu is the homework that gets eaten.
On Thursdays, the deck becomes a dining room and the pace slows. TASTE OF THE SUMMIT starts at five and lingers until the sun chooses a ridge to hide behind. It is a Mediterranean-inspired tapas evening. Vinnie calls it “tapas with a view,” and that is exactly what it feels like. The core list keeps the Spanish backbone intact, then weekly features wander through Italy and Portugal toward the Levant. “We never have the same feature on twice throughout the course of the summer.”
There is a plan for winter, too. And it’s already set. “We’re going to theme it a little more wintry, Christmassy, kind of that spirit of the season vibe.” Think mulled wine, piano, fireplaces, and tapas built for cold hands and long conversations.
Ask chef for a favorite and he smiles. In tapas mode, he points to gambas pil pil. “Sizzling, bubbly, nice and hot with lots of butter that you just mop up with the bread afterwards.” On the barbecue line, he moves to the smoker. Brisket gets time and patience. “We cook it for 14 hours.” Horseradish aioli and pickled jalapeños do the rest. “Everything’s smoked in-house.”
People do not only come for food. They come to get married. The deck over the forest holds ceremonies under the peaks, and the suspension bridge becomes an aisle if a bride wants the walk and the wind. “We try not to go above about 100 people,” Vinnie says, because intimacy suits altitude. The photos make their own case. Some couples cross the bridge in heels (it can be done).
The gondola runs nearly all year. Snow changes the color of the inlet and lays new lines on the slopes. “Absolutely year-round, about 345 days a year.” The mountain changes, so the cooking does too. Winter asks for braises and pastas and sauces that warm hands. Summer asks for prawns that spit in oil, tomatoes that taste like sun and a lager that earns its chill.
What makes it work is less a trick than a stance. Vinnie sets a clear frame, then invites his team to color outside the lines. He keeps menus short and ideas restless. He builds formats that put guests in the scene. This is a chef who designs for place first, then finds the food that belongs there. You can read it in the grilled cheese that eats like a view, in the burger that carries across a lawn, and in the tapas that slow a Thursday into evening.
If you want to understand him, ride up on a Thursday and order prawns and brisket in the same week. See the restraint in the burger and the generosity in the donuts. Watch the staff choose a topping that did not exist yesterday. Listen for the sound prawns make when they hit hot oil.
For Vinnie it’s rewarding work. Each day brings opportunities and challenges. It can get full on. So in that 10 minute ride back down the Gondola it’s a chance to decompress. “You sit there, you just look out and just kind of take a second,” says Vinnie. For someone who climbed through roles and ranks in kitchens in Whistler and now Squamish, the irony isn’t lost that these days Vinnie is again required to climb — this time hundreds of meters through the clouds — on his way to work every day. At least this part of the climb is assisted, and allows him to prepare for each day — on one of our most gorgeous peaks — where he is the master at the summit.
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