For the past eight years, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival has offered food-loving concertgoers an exclusive farm-to-table dining experience set up in the pristine VIP Rose Garden.

The Outstanding in the Field dinner is a family-style meal served on a 200-person table that curves around a green grassy area. Diners are treated to meals by different star chefs each night of the festival that are paired with wine.

Dinner starts at 6 p.m., just as the sun begins to set. At $364.80 a plate (fees included), this experience isn’t cheap. And yes, you can get just as nice of a dinner for that much money, or probably even less, at a fancy restaurant.

But is it worth it?

I checked it out during the first day of the festival on Friday, April 14 and yes, it is worth it, but not particularly for the food. Though the meal is exceptional, it’s much more about the social aspect.

Since it’s one long table, you end up meeting new friends, like the hot dog mogul I sat next to and the FedEx pilot whose wife and daughter and her daughter’s friend took off before the main course to see Blondie perform.

I’ve never sat next to or even near a farmer who grew some of the food I was about to it.

“I come every year to support this. I love the community and I love the environment. It’s dynamic to be eating food with strangers,” Jeffery Lunak, who sat next to me at the dinner said.

Lunak is someone who knows a little about food since he is the founder of Sumo Dog, a Japanese influenced hot dog spot, which has two food stands at Coachella. They also have stands at places like Yankee Stadium and SoFi Stadium and he’s an accomplished chef who worked under Iron Chef master Masaharu Morimoto.

“Tonight for me the highlight is meeting the people. People I’m breaking bread with literally and figuratively,” he said.

Sitting across from us, sporting gold chains and a few rings sat Andrew Franklin, a Florida resident who works as a FedEx pilot.

He flies packages all over the world and was at the festival with his wife and 22-year-old daughter, who was celebrating her college graduation. It was his party who left the dinner early to see Blondie, so Franklin was chatting it up with everyone else at the table.

“I didn’t know what to expect, but this was just a welcome surprise, meeting random people who were fantastic individuals from all walks of life,” he said.

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The chef on Friday night was Zarah Khan, the executive chef of the acclaimed Rustic Canyon restaurant in Santa Monica.

The staff placed plates of food on the table and it was up to the diners to spoon and fork them onto their plates, just like at a family dinner.

The main course of Khan’s four-course dinner was supposed to be halibut with jade rice, but we ended up getting salmon. Before that, the dinner started with pickled turnips followed by roasted mushroom labneh with scallions and lion’s mane powder laffa. That dish was the standout of the dinner and looked like a fancy baba ghanoush.

There was also a salad made with gem lettuce, green radish and tahini green goddess dressing and herbs topped with an orange edible Calendula flower.

The farmer sitting next to us grew that flower. She shared all the ways it could be cooked.

“It’s just a beautiful, edible, versatile flower,” said Nicole Tadros, who along with her husband, Mark Tadros, owns the Aziz Farm, which is based in nearby Thermal.

“You can eat it in its raw form, you can dehydrate it and eat it, I’ve actually air fried it before,” she continued.

Like the others sitting by her, one of her favorite parts of this dinner, besides talking about her flowers, was talking to people she had just met.

“This is all about community, locally grown food and knowing the story behind the food. We didn’t know our neighbors when we sat down and now we do,” she said.

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