About Us
Some of the best meals in Vermont never appear on a reservation platform. They happen at a farmhouse table as the light goes gold over the Green Mountains — a chef at the stove, a menu that existed nowhere else before that night, built from that morning’s market, that week’s forage, that season’s fields.
That is No Reservations VT: a private chef and event company in Woodstock, Vermont, founded in 2022 by Chef Jason Schmidtke. Drawing on two decades in acclaimed kitchens — from Charleston’s Michelin- and James Beard-recognized dining scene to the Woodstock Inn & Resort — Jason creates multi-course tasting menus, private celebrations, and micro weddings for up to 20 guests throughout Vermont and New England. Every menu is chef-driven and tailored to your table, shaped by the farms, foragers, and fishing boats he works with year-round. This isn’t restaurant food delivered to a house. It’s a career’s worth of flavors, lessons, and love — plated one intimate table at a time.
Chef Bio
Jason Schmidtke’s story starts on a riverbank. Raised in Trempealeau, Wisconsin, on the eastern edge of the Mississippi, he spent his childhood fishing the river bottoms and hunting the bluffs — learning, before he ever wore whites, that great food begins long before the kitchen. He bussed his first tables at fourteen. He never looked back.
Culinary school took him from Minneapolis to Miami, where classical French technique gave structure to instinct. But it was Charleston that made him a chef. Over nearly a decade in the Lowcountry, Jason cooked his way through the city’s most storied kitchens: Peninsula Grill, the Relais & Châteaux icon, under Anthony Bourdain protégé Graham Dailey; the Forbes Five-Star Sanctuary Hotel on Kiawah Island; and Leon’s Fine Poultry & Oysters, the beloved oyster bar now holding a Michelin Bib Gourmand, a James Beard Award semifinalist nod, and a place on Michelin’s list of America’s best seafood shacks — where Jason’s enduring love affair with fresh shellfish took root.
The deepest influence came from James Beard-nominated Chef Ken Vedrinski at Trattoria Lucca and Coda del Pesce. Under Vedrinski, Jason discovered Northern Italian cooking — the reverence for ingredients, the discipline of restraint, the belief that every plate should tell you where it came from. It remains the soul of how he cooks. In 2019, Jason traded the Lowcountry for the Green Mountains, joining the Woodstock Inn & Resort as Special Events Chef. Three years later, he founded No Reservations VT, built on one idea: Vermont’s finest dining experience shouldn’t require a reservation — it should come to your table. Today he cooks tasting menus, celebrations, and weddings for up to 20 guests across Vermont and New England. When he’s not doing that, you can find him behind the cheese counter at the Woodstock Farmers Market, keeping close to the farmers, foragers, and makers who shape every menu.
Technical by training. Personal by nature. Never pretentious.