Congratulations to Aiden Tibbetts, chef of Wildflower and the 2025 MICHELIN Guide Colorado Young Chef Award Winner, presented in partnership with Sysco!
A hidden gem in Denver for several years, Wildflower has now emerged into the forefront. Leading the kitchen is Aiden Tibbetts, who has been in charge since age 23. With Mexican and Italian cuisine as a base, Chef Tibbetts draws on his family’s global military background and local garden upbringing for his heartfelt culinary approaches. Using seasonal ingredients from the region, including in his own mother’s garden, dishes truly strike a harmonious balance: local yet global, artful yet technically precise.
Recently, we spoke with him about his journey to becoming the chef he is today.
How would you describe Wildflower?
I always tell people, it's become whatever we want to cook. We're just trying to make food that we really want to eat on a daily basis. We've kept at heart the original game plan: Mexico and Italy, and then added some techniques that I developed while I was in France and California.
We’re focused on hyper seasonality, using products that I knew the people growing them would be doing the right things. It’s not just a buzzword. My mom's garden kind of started as a funny joke. At the restaurant, we were having trouble getting flowers from California. Growing up, we always had a little garden. I was over at my parents house, and she was like, “I've got flowers. Do you just want to grab some of these?” It’s now 15 to 20 pounds of cucumbers a week, 15 to 20 pounds of tomatoes a week. We're not trying to make this massive farm that makes a ton of profit. We're just trying to find the best products.
What inspired you to become a chef?
Family. I come from a predominantly German family. My grandma was a fairly good cook. My mom took that to the next level. We didn't have that much money, and we never ate out, so it was what we could cook in the house. Even if you hate your food, you eat all your food. That was always the rule.
We are also a military family, so we bounced around quite a bit. I grew up in Kansas, Spokane and Colorado Springs. My dad would bring back influences. He'd be like, 'I was in Japan, and we ate sushi.' We were shopping at the military supermarket like, “can we eat this fish raw? I don't think so.” We ate shark from the commissary one time, and we cooked it up, no idea what we're doing. It was a great way to get a lot of cultural influence because Japan, France and all these places that he was stationed at shaped what I bring into [cooking].
My mom is doing the garden and all. She is an accountant, incredibly intelligent and put that all on hold to homeschool my brother and me. So, I spent my entire life homeschooled, from preschool until my first day of college at Johnson & Wales. Throughout all of that, it's been the ability to create and fail, and it just traveled directly into my career. When things go wrong, they're like, 'why are you so calm with this?' We're just practicing for the next one because mistakes happen, and they teach us so much. It really is an R&D kitchen in every sense, being able to fail and not being worried about what the ramifications of that are.
That’s the greatest gift that my parents have given to me throughout all of this.
What motivates you?
The changes on a daily basis. We'll play around with anything, and if people like it, we'll keep serving it. That's really the inspiration for it: it changes every day, and that keeps me excited.
I really enjoy the different personalities of the guys that we have on the team. Sometimes it's a shoulder to cry on. Sometimes it's life happening. Sometimes it's getting into the nitty gritty of it. Other times we need to rethink what we’re thinking about. The inspiration and the creativity stem from all those guys. A while back, one of my cooks did cotton candy on a pasta. That's really become a staple.
What’s been your favorite memory at Wildflower?
I'm the kind of person who doesn't look back that much. Probably just getting taken on as Chef de Cuisine and understanding how much freedom and responsibility that comes along with that. And then hitting that Executive Chef mark when I was 23. I was a deer in the headlights. It was eye opening.
Every day is kind of a new favorite memory to be like, alright, we're getting better. That's always been the goal and why our guys have stuck around for so long. Our minds are evolving, and everything that you know we're doing as a restaurant, we can do better every single time.
What advice would you give to a young person who wants to become a chef?
Work as hard as you can while still maintaining the happiness and joy and interest in what it is that you're cooking. As soon as you lose that, you take a step back. I'm so incredibly lucky to work with my dishwasher on a daily basis and see his pride in what it is that he's doing. If you're not proud and interested and excited for what you're doing on a daily basis, you need to move along. This is not an industry where you can just sit there and collect the paycheck. All your diners will immediately taste it. It’s working and falling in love with what you're cooking and then doing it again the next day. Setting those boundaries too. So many up-and-coming chefs that have so much potential get sucked into this lifestyle of burnout. Going out again and again, and by the end of the week, you don't have any juice for creativity or the grind.
Mental health being a huge piece of the conversation right now, we switched to a four-day work week for all of my guys except myself. We don't have any prep cooks, so they come in at noon, and they prep all the way through, which is a gift to them. It's really important to see the starting pieces of the dish and where everything begins, then working it all the way through, then seeing the service side, getting to interact with tables and seeing the end result.
Kelly Calvillo / Chef Aiden Tibbetts
