Twenty-four hours before crowds were set to stream through the gates of BottleRock Napa Valley, Gerard Nebesky was unloading wheelbarrows filled with produce inside the 32-acre Napa Valley Expo, the three-day music, food and wine festival scheduled to run May 22 through 24.
Nebesky, who runs Gerard’s Paella, expected to cook roughly 80 giant pans of paella each day — each pan yielding about 100 servings — from a 20-by-20-foot booth beside the Williams Sonoma Culinary Stage. His setup would need six 5½-foot paella pans, a commercial refrigerator, water containers and a 10-person crew to feed festivalgoers among nearly 70 vendors.
Ingredients alone illustrated the scale: 55-pound bags of rice and onions, roughly 80 cases of chicken stored in a shared refrigerated trailer with other vendors, and crews moving heavy gear. “It’s been a great ride,” Nebesky said as his team unrolled a tarp across the booth floor on Thursday afternoon and arranged tables and signs.
Nebesky’s operation brought family into the field. His stepdaughter, Lilya Ming, helped oversee the propane-fired pans while Kaya Ming managed the front of house. Kaya’s fiancé, Logan Ruyballia, and his brother Jaden handled much of the heavy lifting; Logan, pushing a wheelbarrow through the fairgrounds, said, “It’s a real treat for all of us every year,” and Kaya added, “It’s fun doing the setup.”
The food lineup at BottleRock stretched from Michelin-starred restaurants and celebrity chefs to stands selling caviar-topped corn dogs, Wagyu meatballs, gourmet pizza, ahi tuna nachos and classic festival fare, a mix that helps explain why Nebesky has become a staple at Wine Country festivals, Coachella and county fairs for years.
Context mattered: Nebesky is a veteran of those stages — he defeated Bobby Flay in a paella competition in 2008 and was portrayed by Jason Schwartzman in the 2019 film Wine Country — and had spent two recent weekends serving paella at Coachella where temperatures inside his tent topped 100 degrees. The scale and heat of those events inform how he plans and stocks for BottleRock.
The tension showed up in logistics. Packing six massive pans and a 10-person crew into a single booth required tight choreography, but much of the cold storage had to be shared with other vendors, and the heavy equipment meant family members doing the grunt work. Even with veteran experience, the setup can strain space, time and manpower in the narrow corridor beside the Culinary Stage.
What happens next is straightforward and unapologetic: over the three days of the festival, Nebesky’s crew will feed thousands. He expects to run roughly 80 pans each day from May 22 through 24, each pan delivering about 100 servings, and to keep turning those pans until the final notes fade. “I think we have helped to make Spanish food more popular in the U.S.,” Nebesky said — a claim his steady lines at festivals have long supported.
