Food for Life By Paula E. Kirman

Pradera's Pride: Chef Ross Munro

Food is Chef Ross Munro’s life‹and that’s no exaggeration! The Executive Chef of the Westin Hotel cooked long before it ever earned him a paycheque.

“I was cooking since the time I was six, seven, eight, nine years old,” says Munro. “I prepared my first prime rib dinner when I was nine,” and he chuckles.

As a result, the choice to become a chef was a natural one for Munro. “I didn’t want to do anything else. I just loved cooking, and I loved food.” He attended the two-year program in Culinary Management at George Brown College in Toronto. After living in Ontario and Quebec, Munro and his wife (then in the military) moved to Alberta when she was posted to Cold Lake.

“Short of flipping burgers at A&W in Cold Lake there wasn’t anything up there, so I took a stint as a sous chef at Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise for about a year and a half,” Munro explains. The family, which now includes three children aged eight, three, and one-and-a-half, headed for Calgary, where Munro became the Executive Sous Chef at the Hyaat Regency.

Munro’s move to Edmonton is the classic case of one door closing, while another one opens. He originally applied as Executive Chef at the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald, but another chef was hired for the position. Shortly thereafter, the Macdonald’s General Manager was having lunch with the Westin’s GM, who expressed a need for a chef. Munro’s name came up, and he has been with the Westin for two and a half years since.

Munro’s philosophy about food preparation is two-fold. “One is using the freshest ingredients possiblethe fresher the better. Anywhere I have gone, we buy as colloquial as we can with our local suppliers and growers.

“The other thing is, we’re a real grassroots culinary facility at the Westin. We have a very strict hiring practice. We bring applicants back in to cook‹it doesn’t matter if you’re applying for prep or if you’re an exec. sous applying for a job; we just want to know where your head and your heart and your hands are with food,” he explains.

One of Munro’s favourite parts of the Westin’s menu is dessert. “Even though I am not a pastry chef, I love running through the concepts with our pastry people and creating different things. We’re doing stuff with our banquets that I don’t think many of the restaurants are doing‹we’re serving banquets with four or five component desserts, where there are three different temperatures: tepid, frozen, or warm.

“I like working with my staff and creating whatever we can; trying to provide an element that’s not available anywhere else.”

In fact, working with others is what Munro enjoys most about his job. “We have an excellent executive team here who have allowed us to do so much. There is a very open management style in the hotel. People are free to think on their own, make a mistake, and then regroup and move forward.”

Munro says that one of his biggest challenges is “keeping people on track. Some days are so busy you just can’t see everybody everyday, but that hands-on is so important.” Busy indeed: Munro quips that no matter what time of year it is, “I come to work in the dark and I usually leave in the dark.”

He doesn’t take his role lightly. For Ross Munro, food and life are intertwined, and his dedication is a large part of what makes the dining experience at the Westin what it is. “We have a great reputation to uphold. We’re trying ensure that we meet that challenge everyday.”