Montage Deer Valley’s new gingerbread display, a Sundance-inspired vintage theater made almost entirely of edible components, is now open to the public after being revealed over Thanksgiving weekend. Executive Pastry Chef Romie Fisher said the idea took shape early in the year.
Montage Deer Valley’s annual gingerbread installation is now on view in the hotel’s lobby, following its unveiling after the Thanksgiving holiday. This year’s display — a Sundance-inspired vintage theater made almost entirely of edible components — marks what Executive Pastry Chef Romie Fisher describes as one of her pastry team’s most meaningful projects yet.
“With Sundance leaving us, and this one being the last year they’re going to be with us, we all agreed that was the strongest idea,” she said, recalling that they were considering topics back in May. “We wanted to pay tribute to the history and everything they have done for the town, and sadly, then Robert Redford passed away.”
As the team researched the festival’s origins, Fisher said they found unexpected similarities between its founding purpose and her own approach at Montage.
“It matched a lot of the Montage spirit and what we do as a team,” she said. “When Robert Redford started Sundance, what he had at heart was to create a space where multiple voices could be heard and multiple points of view could be shared with other people.”
Fisher said that view mirrored how her team collaborates, not just on large pastry builds, but on the everyday demands of their jobs.
“We all have different backgrounds, we all have different skills and point of views, and I think that we accomplish these big projects and these big things because we all come together and share,” she said. “So I felt like what he was trying to do is what we do often as a team.”
As she revisited films that became breakout hits after premiering at Sundance, Fisher said she was touched by the magnitude of Redford’s achievement. She said rewatching many Sundance films as research for the display further reinforced the cultural weight those films carried.
“When you look at which movies became popular and at what time that was, I think a lot of them brought a message to society, an idea that wasn’t being shared before,” she said. “I think that that’s so incredibly powerful; it gives me chills.”
The final display blends that history with a holiday lens. Fisher said the goal was to honor Sundance “in a whimsical way,” resulting in a fully functioning, vintage-style Christmas theater complete with edible chocolate frames, four nutcrackers on stage, velvet curtains and overhead elements like clouds and chairlift string lights.
The nutcrackers — a return from last year’s gingerbread display — are made entirely of chocolate to look like a miner, a beekeeper, a skier and a paleontologist, each representing historically significant Park City professions. This year, a fifth nutcracker joins the lineup, made to look like Redford sitting in a director’s chair.
Fisher said the team chose favorite Christmas movies to project on the screen built into the display, and they’ll have fresh popcorn running throughout the month.
“We’re going to be playing Christmas movies until Christmas is over,” she said. “I’m very excited, because I can see all the kids standing in front. We’re going to play ‘The Grinch’ and ‘Home Alone’ and all these classical Christmas movies.”
The display also features about 30 edible chocolate frames hung on a gingerbread wall, each created as a collage of iconic scenes from a film that found success after Sundance, Fisher said. The work allowed her to revisit some favorites, like “Little Miss Sunshine.”
Fisher said the frames and nutcrackers are made up of about 700 pounds of chocolate, while the installation includes about 1,700 gingerbread cookies. The wood-style flooring pieces on the stage, made from carved and airbrushed fondant, total roughly 54 pounds. This year they decided against using royal icing, which usually poses a challenge in the dry Park City climate, Fisher explained. So rather than re-piping all season, they used food-safe construction materials for core bonds.
“Obviously we want to keep most of the components edible because that’s how we make art. So we decided that this year we’re going to try to stay a little bit away from the icing … and we’re using some bonding materials that are like construction materials,” she said. “It is made with food, but it’s not meant to be eaten.”
As always, creating large installations like these require support from the engineering team, and Fisher emphasized their role in the finished project.
“The most important components are out of food or have some kind of food finish, but engineering is as big of a contributor as the pastry kitchen is on this,” she said. “Every year we learn more and more and more, so we prepared better for it.”