Alan Bergo

A stay at St Bernard’s Hill House is enhanced by delicious food prepared by top class chefs.

Your choice of private chef creates a truly unique experience, where every meal is carefully crafted with the finest ingredients to your tastes.

Known as the Forager Chef, Chef Alan Bergo is a James Beard Award-winning Chef, author of The Forager’s Book of Flora, host of The Wild Harvest.

He is one of America’s leading culinary authorities on mushroom hunting and foraging. He spent nearly two decades as a professional chef, and was Executive Chef at Lucia’s Restaurant, Minneapolis and The Salt Cellar, St Paul, MN.

Now he’s available to cook for you.

My food is very minimalist. It’s very simple, ingredient focused. I used to tell my cooks, “Before we put one more thing on the plate, take something off.”

If you’ve ever been to Chez Panisse, you’ll know that kind of food. You get the freshest ingredients possible and let them do the job. Just treat them very simply. That’s how I like to cook.

Foraging and cooking so closely with the seasons like I do, the food is ephemeral in its very nature. That’s one of the most beautiful things. Each meal is like a snapshot of a time and place.

It’s fleeting. It’s here to enjoy and then it’s gone.

You may never taste it again or have it exactly prepared like that again. I think that’s part of the excitement.

It’s so exciting to get to eat a new plant. It’s like Christmas for me. All new ingredients for a chef are like catnip. It’s very exciting.

It’s a giant scavenger hunt that starts the moment I get off the plane. I am looking for things that I know that are familiar, things that I don’t know, things that I want to know. I’m a perpetual learner and I just have this knack for teaching myself things.

Also, working with all the different fish and lobster, That is a dream.

The beautiful thing about shellfish is that every part of it is magical. Crab, lobster… all these crustaceans and shellfish are very similar in their properties.

The shells are where the magic is because they have compounds that are extremely fat and water soluble. So, I take the shells, roast them, pound them into a pulp with a mallet, then put them in a little bit of oil or in some butter.

I credit winning Chef vs Wild on Hulu on this. I collected tiny crabs, cooked them on a hot stone outside, pounded them up, made butter, cooked them with the butter and clarified it. Then I made Oysters Rockefeller topped with wild crab butter hollandaise.

You can also make a very good stock – a little bit of sherry, leeks, shallots, onion, garlic, bouquet of thyme, a little bay leaf, and a little bit of tomato. Cook that and strain it and that’s your base for your classic lobster bisque.

Or a bouillabaisse, all the Mediterranean shellfish stews, or a pasta sauce.

Risotto, soups, paella, there’re so many different things you can cook with it.

It depends on your tastes and how interactive you want to be.

I might ask you “would you like to have a garden tour on Thursday, and we could have a simple plant walk?” Then we walk around St Bernard’s Hill House’s gardens. We might find some weeds or leafy greens like amaranth or callaloo and maybe there’s a little snack or a demonstration on one of my favorite ways to cook greens.

I can show you different parts of plants, how to make them beautiful, put them on a plate, and make them taste good. With really high quality, seasonal ingredients, you don’t need to do a lot to them.

Or if you really like homemade pasta, I worked with chefs from Italy for 10 years, so we’ll have a pasta demonstration. Or maybe you want to taste all the different fruits that are at the market.

Or you want to learn how to cook a specific piece of fish….

I taught in restaurants for 18 years and I teach people every day online. There are all kinds of demonstrations we could do.

One of the great joys of my life is making people happy and every experience is different.

I can show you how to cook just about anything.  It’s only really limited to your imagination, what’s down in the market and what’s growing there.

When you have someone preparing food who is right there with you, interacting, willing to talk and explain things, that’s an experience that you don’t get very often.

It’s very different than just having a server drop something off at your table.

It’s really special.

Thank you, Chef Alan.

St Bernard’s Hill House is a luxury villa set atop one of Tortola’s highest mountains.

Imagine learning to cook your favorite dishes with Chef Alan, then savoring every delicious mouthful as you enjoy panoramic ocean and island views of the Virgin Islands.

Get in touch with St Bernard’s Hill House concierge team to find out more at info@stbernardshillhouse.com

Find out more about Chef Alan Bergo at