The Executive Chef of the 2008 and 2009 Winemakers Dinners is the celebrated Vikram Garg, Halekulani Executive Chef, who emerges as a chef of limitless proportion, celebrated for his masterful ability to envision unabashed cuisine that is beyond ethnic food groups, illustriously infusing the finest in regional ingredients and ultimately satisfying a universal palette with memorable gastronomic experiences.  His passion is the menu degustation; a chefs finest expression of avant-garde cooking, a culinary art form that is superior and alive in its creative seasonal structure but never, ever cautious. As Executive Chef of the world-renowned Halekulani, Vikram Garg oversees the culinary vision for the hotel’s award-winning restaurants and culinary program including House Without a Key, The Veranda, Orchids, La Mer, Lewers Lounge, 24-hour In-Room Dining and Hawaii’s leading banquet program.

Vikram’s culinary philosophy is that cooking, at its root, is the language of experience, provocative foresight, harmony yet complexity, and distinctive cultures revealed through sight, taste and smell. He deems regional cuisine as a style expressing geographical and cultural context infused with culinary traditions – an evolving provisional pursuit which is defying the common barriers of sweet and savory tendencies in today’s kitchen. With the commitment to use local, select seasonal and cook global, Vikram incorporates and exploits his classical training in French, Mediterranean and South-East Asian cuisine with his indigenous Indian techniques which stimulate the simplicity of a novice palette and defy the discrimination of a gourmand. Vikram’s inquisitiveness for unconventional ingredient pairing, styles of cooking and the art of plating are insatiable. This sensorial pursuit results in a chef’s daily challenge to create cuisine that awakens a guests’ memory of a time and place, while bringing gastronomic value to the culinary matrix of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, heat and spice.

A graduate of Delhi’s Oberoi School of Hotel Management and a recipient of a Post-Graduate degree at the Oberoi Center for Learning and Development, Vikram Garg has honed his culinary skills at some of India’s top five-star Hotels and Restaurants including, Bay Island in Port Blair, Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai (Bombay) and New Delhi, and the Metropolitan Palace Hotel in Dubai.  In 2000, Vikram headed to the British Virgin Islands as the Executive Sous Chef at Rosewood’s Little Dix Bay.  After his stint in the Caribbean, he decided to return to India as leader of the kitchen at Leela Kempinski Palace, a five-star resort in Bangalore. While back in India, Vikram contributed to the Asian Menu Planner cookbook, which focuses on delicious meal recommendations for all occasions featuring subtle Southeast Asian & Indian delicacies.  Little did he know this experience would be the perfect precursor to his time at ‘indebleu’, Washington DC.; where he brought a passion for food and a respect for the flavors of his native country to the culinary Mecca of  the country’s capital.

A member of the DC ‘Chefs Club’, his culinary contributions in Washington extend beyond the kitchen.  He is an active member in the area’s charity community, in 2006 he was selected as a battling chef for DC Central Kitchen’s ‘Capital Food Fight’, and he was ‘March of Dimes’ honorary chef for 2006. He also donates his time and talents to countless other charitable events including ‘Share Our Strength’, DC Grill Master Series benefiting Juvenile Diabetes and Zoofari. Vikram has also been involved with the annual ‘Meals from the Masters’ Celebrity Chef's Brunch which benefits Meals on Wheels Delaware. His most recent charity event charged him as executive chef of the ‘Wine Makers Dinners’ in the British Virgin Islands. He is regularly invited as an honorary guest chef at many fine dining restaurants all over the world; ‘Tabla’, New York, ‘Seafood Cellar’, Reykjavík, Iceland, ‘Inn at Easton’, Maryland, ‘L’Epuisette’, a Michelin star restaurant in  Marseille, France.
 
Outside of the kitchen and away from farms and markets, Vikram enjoys life in Hawaii with his wife Abhilasha and two daughters Iya Akanke, Veda Asmi. He finds extreme pleasure in preparing a custom degustation-style meal, around a chefs table, for his friends…truly, his guests.