Mark Burt, Kahler Grand Hotel
By Mike Mitchelson

It’s a short story,” said Mark Burt, executive chef at the Kahler Grand Hotel in Rochester, Minn., explaining his culinary background. “I never attended culinary school, just basically worked up through the ranks.”

That statement might lead one to believe that Burt, a Rochester native, simply started his career at the Kahler and ascended to the top job from sheer longevity. That’s certainly not the case, but he did start working in a kitchen as a teenager in Rochester. “There’s not much you can do at that age but work in a kitchen, wash dishes, whatever,” he said.

Culinary education began at home, where Burt’s mother cooked meals for him and his 13 brothers and sisters. “You learned to cook at a very young age,” he said, laughing. “I was flippin’ my own cheese omelets at about 8 years old. With 14 kids, if you missed a meal, my mom wasn’t there to service every child individually.”

Burt discovered cooking came naturally for him, and, when he graduated high school, was able to work for “some awesome chefs,” he said. “And from there, quite honestly, I was married at 22, had a family going, and this was a pretty sure-fire way to make ends meet.”

A job to make ends meet turned into something much more when he became the executive chef at the Radisson Hotel in Rochester at the age of 24—and he never felt the need for culinary school. “When you work in a hotel, there’s a very wide variety of things you’re going to have to be accustomed to,” he said. “The restaurants, catering, banquets and all different nationalities of food. You need to be a really well-rounded individual.”

From the Radisson, he became a corporate chef for about seven years for Fine Host Corporation, a company that manages large-scale foodservice operations such as education, healthcare and stadium facilities. Fine Host sent him around the Midwest and to California and Florida opening new accounts. During that time, he was plucked by Fine Host’s president to be one of five executive chefs to work the Super Bowl between the Baltimore Ravens and New York Giants in Tampa Bay, Fla.—Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium’s foodservice operation was run by Fine Host. Burt arrived at the stadium two weeks before the game to prepare food for the media circus, including all the major networks, MTV, ESPN, celebrities and their entourages. “We prepared everything from ballpark franks to the very high-end, five-star meals,” Burt said.

He returned to Rochester and the life of a high-caliber hotel chef when he was hired as a sous chef at the Kahler about three years ago. He became executive chef about 10 months ago.

What’s interesting about the Kahler, Burt said, is that it’s a hotel within a hotel—recently opened within the Kahler is the International Hotel. The International occupies the entire top floor of the Kahler Grand Hotel with 26 high-end, luxury suites—guests don’t check in at the Kahler’s front desk; the International is entirely self-contained, and guests are also assigned a personal concierge. For dining, guests choose among four menus. “There’s a spa menu, a Middle Eastern-type menu, then there’s the regular room service menu, then there’s an overnight menu,” Burt said.

And if those International guests still don’t find something to their liking, they need only to ask the kitchen to make what they want, be it a plate of scrambled eggs or a five-course tasting menu with a wine flight. “We’re pretty much at their mercy; we make a lot of trips to the supermarket at all hours of the night sometimes,” Burt said. “Our motto is, ‘Yes is the answer, what’s the question?’”

Staffing 24 hours for the International Hotel turned out to be less complicated than Burt feared, however, with one well-trained chef able to handle the orders. “Granted, when the floor is full, it can get a little hairy, so we run a sous chef to work with him,” he said.


The Mayo link

One might not think that Rochester, a city with a population of less than 100,000 in Southeast Minnesota, would have much use for a high-priced, exclusive hotel such as the International. But right next door is the Mayo Clinic, one of the most famous hospitals in the world. Patients and their families from all socio-economic strata across the globe come to the Mayo Clinic for treatment. It is those on the very top of the economic ladder that the International was designed to serve.

“There isn’t a place in town for those people that have that kind of income and lifestyle,” Burt said. “Who would go to Rochester and spend that kind of money? It’s people that have to be here, and don’t have a choice. And we’re given an opportunity to service that clientele. And the International has at least doubled expectations right from the get-go.”

The majority of those International clients are either patients or the family of a patient, and they’re a diverse group, although, Burt observed, the majority are well-to-do Americans.

The Clinic has had many famous Middle Eastern patients, including King Hussein of Jordon, in recent years, and, overall, a large number of Middle Eastern patients who fly to Rochester for treatment, and many stay at the Kahler and the International. “At least 50 percent of our guests are Mayo patients,” Burt said.

The number of visitors from the Middle East have declined somewhat since 9/11, Burt said, but the staff remains well-versed in the region’s cuisine, even borrowing some Mayo translators from Lebanon and other countries to test flavor profiles.

The Kahler is physically linked to the Mayo Clinic via a pedestrian subway and skyway, but there’s also a significant historical link. The hotel was originally designed to serve patients at the clinic.

While the hotel is its own entity, it still works with the Mayo Clinic to provide dining for those patients staying in the Kahler. The hotel’s “Right Choice” menu is designed specifically for them.

“Mayo has recommendations for their patients on what they can and can’t eat—some are on a liquid diet,” Burt said. “We’ve created menus just for that. … Mayo is very gracious, they’ll run all the numbers on all the menu items that I have, and give me the entire breakdowns of calories, saturated fats—the whole nine yards. And we get together when we’re going to put together a new menu.”


Managing the kitchen

The Kahler produces every meal for its hotel guests and its two restaurants, the upscale-casual Lord Essex and the more standard Grand Grill (which turns between 500 and 700 covers a day, Burt said) out of one central kitchen. “We have a couple different restaurant lines, and collectively they’ll service the International and room service throughout the hotel,” Burt said. “It’s a staff of about 30—20 culinary and 10 in the sanitation area.”

Managing the staff leaves little time for Burt to actually cook. “My office is located in the kitchen, but that’s about as deep as I go,” he joked. Unless things are tremendously busy—such as September, which is usually a very busy catering month.

“Out of an average 10-hour day, if I’m out in the kitchen for an hour, that would be the most,” he said. “Most of my day is pushing pencils, creating menus. I write a lot of special menus for different clientele just about every week.”

Burt spends enough time in the kitchen to put his stamp on the menu, however, which means from-scratch cooking with fresh ingredients. “It’s a trend that a lot of people are going with boxed deserts and boxed appetizers, because when you’ve got a high-volume kitchen it’s just easier,” he said. “But rather than buying a lot of boxed hors d’oeuvres, we create all our own canapés.”

After a 50- to 75-hour work week at the hotel, Burt spends little time at home cooking. “If I do two or three meals a week at home, that’s the most, and it’s usually on the grill, something outside,” he said.

That’s time he’d rather spend with his wife and four children, or out in the garage working on a different project altogether, very un-kitchen related. And if there’s time, a round of golf. “I don’t have much of a game anymore,” he said, laughing. “Since I got back in the hotel, my game went right in the toilet. But I do enjoy it.”