What was Nirvana Food & Wine?
Nirvana Food & Wine was a late-April festival of chef parties staged across Sanctuary Camelback Mountain, the casita resort terraced into the north face of Camelback in Paradise Valley, for three years, 2017 to 2019. It was the creation of Beau MacMillan, Sanctuary’s executive chef since 1998 and a Food Network regular who had beaten Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America, and it ran on his address book: Robert Irvine, Scott Conant and Todd English every year, Stephanie Izard, Aarón Sánchez and Chuck Hughes in 2018, José Garces in 2019, with the Valley’s best-known cooks filling the stations under them.
The format was the pitch. Rather than one tasting tent, Nirvana sold a circuit of separately ticketed nights in different corners of the resort: a bourbon party on the infinity-pool lawn, Champagne and fried chicken in the ballroom, a walk-around Best of the West at Elements and the Jade Bar, a rosé brunch, a tequila-and-tortillas farewell, winemaker dinners for twenty in a private casa, and a celebrity golf tournament down the hill at Mountain Shadows. Tickets ran $85 to $400 an event in 2017 and $125 to $500 by 2019, when the festival stretched to five days and a dozen events.
The fourth edition was announced for April 16–19, 2020. In March the organizers postponed it to the fall; no fall date came. MacMillan resigned as executive chef in January 2022 and opened Cala in Old Town Scottsdale that year, and the festival’s web address now points to a dental practice in Missouri. For a Scottsdale visitor it is a fifteen-minute drive to a party that no longer exists, and the clearest case study in how a Valley food festival depends on one person.
How to do it
There is nothing to book. Nirvana has not been held since April 2019, and as of October 2026 neither Sanctuary nor MacMillan has announced a return. If a revival ever comes it would be posted by the resort, which was the organizer, host and venue in one.
See the setting anyway. Every Nirvana event except the golf was staged on Sanctuary’s 53 acres, and a non-guest can still walk most of it. Book a table at the Jade Bar forty-five minutes before sunset, then dinner at Elements, the glass-walled room hanging over the Valley where Best of the West was poured; in season it needs a couple of weeks’ notice. The infinity pool where Robert Irvine hosted the 2017 opening is guests-only. The resort is at 5700 E McDonald Dr, up the hill from the Tatum-McDonald intersection, 15 minutes from Old Town via Lincoln or McDonald.
Follow the chef. MacMillan’s cooking is at Cala, the Mediterranean room he opened in 2022 with Clive Collective in the Senna House hotel on Old Town’s north edge, and his partners have since added spots in north Scottsdale and Tempe. Elements stayed in the family: his longtime chef de cuisine Samantha Sanz kept her post when Landon Post moved up from banquet chef to run the kitchen in 2022.
Buy the festival that survived. The Devour Culinary Classic at the Desert Botanical Garden, February 27–28, 2027, is the Valley’s chef festival, with a juried Arizona lineup rather than television names; tickets go on public sale November 30. For the newspaper tasting, see the USA TODAY Wine & Food Experience in October. The Camelback Corridor guide covers the restaurants in between.
Three Aprils on the mountain
The first Nirvana Food & Wine ran April 27–30, 2017. Sanctuary billed it as a weekend-long circuit of intimate receptions rather than a festival, and the schedule read like a resort’s dream weekend: Torch, a Thursday reception around the infinity pool hosted by Robert Irvine with Micah Olson and Jason Asher behind the bar; Birds & Bubbles, fried chicken and Champagne on Friday; a Saturday dinner honoring Chuck Wagner of Caymus; Best of the West, a chef-and-wine showcase through Elements and the Jade Bar; and a New Orleans brunch with a jazz trio on Sunday. The Valley bench was Justin Beckett, Bernie Kantak, Alex Stratta, Christopher Gross, Gio Osso, Mark Tarbell, Stephen Jones and Charles Wiley from Hearth ‘61. Tickets were $85 to $400, overnight packages started at $479, and every event sold out.
2018, April 19–22, kept the bones and raised the names. Stephanie Izard and Chuck Hughes hosted Flutes & Coops, Aarón Sánchez the Tequila & Tortillas brunch, Todd English the Rosé Parté, Scott Conant and Tony Abou-Ganim Best of the West; the Thursday party became Bourbon Street Blues, presented by Bulleit; and the Master of Taste dinners arrived, $350 seatings in a private casa with winemakers like Dan Kosta and Tuck Beckstoffer, plus a late-added $500 dinner with Kurt Russell and his Gogi wines at a Paradise Valley residence. The golf moved to the brand-new Mountain Shadows at $2,000 a foursome. Sanctuary’s managing director, Michael Surguine, told Pulling Corks and Forks that “Scottsdale is an emerging hotbed for culinary expression,” which was the whole thesis: a Paradise Valley resort using a Scottsdale address to sell a national weekend.
2019, April 24–28, was the biggest: five days and twelve events, opening with a family-style Wood, Wine & Wagyu dinner ($225), adding a Nirvana After Party at Fat Ox ($125) and moving the Rosé Parté to the Wrigley Mansion ($150), with José Garces joining Irvine and English and four Master of Taste dinners at $350 to $500. Local coverage could not agree on the count, calling it both the third and the fifth annual; by the calendar it was the third. It was also the last.
Why it stopped
The 2020 program, April 16–19, was already on sale, with Irvine, Conant, John Tesar, René Andrade and Russell LaCasce in the kitchens, the Bella Twins and Rob Riggle as celebrity draws and Tequila & Tortillas moved to the Hotel Valley Ho, when the organizers announced in March that they were postponing “to the Fall” and that tickets would carry over. The fall date never came, and neither did a 2021 announcement. Then, in January 2022, Phoenix Magazine reported that MacMillan had resigned his longtime position as executive chef, moving to a culinary-advisor role while Landon Post took the kitchen, and by that spring he had opened Cala in Scottsdale. A festival that had been, from the first year, one chef’s guest list could not easily survive that chef’s departure from the building, and nothing since suggests anyone tried. By 2026 the domain had lapsed to an unrelated business.
The Scottsdale angle
Nirvana belongs on the same shelf as the Scottsdale Culinary Festival, which ran its last edition the same April, 2019, and our list of lost Scottsdale events: two very different food festivals, one a forty-year volunteer picnic and one a three-year celebrity weekend, both ended by the spring of 2020 and neither brought back. What a visitor can still have is the thing Nirvana was selling in the first place, a late-April evening on the north side of Camelback with the Valley lights coming on below Elements. That costs a dinner reservation and a drive over Lincoln, and in April it is still the best table in the corridor.