Twenty-four hours before crowds were set to stream through the gates of BottleRock Napa Valley, Gerard Nebesky was already in motion at the Napa Valley Expo, unloading wheelbarrows of produce and lining up the pans that would feed thousands of festivalgoers.

The Sonoma County cook is expected to make roughly 80 giant pans of paella each day during the three-day music, food and wine festival, which runs May 22 through 24. Each pan yields about 100 servings, and the setup inside the Culinary Garden was built around the scale of that demand: a 20-by-20-foot booth beside the Williams Sonoma Culinary Stage, six 5½-foot paella pans, 80 cases of chicken and a 10-person crew moving between prep tables and storage.

For Nebesky, the work is part production line, part annual reunion. His team includes his stepdaughter Lilya Ming, her sister Kaya Ming, Kaya’s fiancé Logan Ruyballia and Logan’s brother Jaden. As the group arranged tablecloths and signs around the booth, Ming said, “It’s fun doing the setup,” and Ruyballia called the festival “a real treat for all of us every year.”

BottleRock’s food lineup this year includes nearly 70 vendors, ranging from Michelin-starred restaurants and celebrity chefs to stands serving caviar-topped corn dogs, Wagyu meatballs, gourmet pizza, ahi tuna nachos and classic festival fare. Nebesky’s corner of that scene is unusually familiar for a man who has spent more than two decades serving paella at large events, from Wine Country festivals and Coachella to county fairs.

That history matters because the scale is unforgiving. Nebesky’s crew shared a refrigerated trailer with other vendors for meat and supplies, and he has said the heat can become punishing during big outdoor events; at Coachella, temperatures inside the tent topped 100 degrees. Yet the pace has kept him coming back. “It’s been a great ride,” he said, and added that he believes his work has helped make Spanish food more popular in the U.S.

That arc also reaches beyond the festival grounds. In 2008, Nebesky defeated Bobby Flay in a paella competition on the Food Network, and in 2019 Jason Schwartzman portrayed a fictionalized version of him in the film “Wine Country.” At BottleRock, though, the spotlight is less about celebrity and more about logistics: wheelbarrows, pans, cases, and a crew racing the clock before the gates open. By the time the first festivalgoers arrive, the cooking will already be under way.