Dean C. Ecker Food and Beverage Director/Executive Chef Black Butte Ranch Black Butte Ranch, Ore.

Dean Ecker showed a penchant for cooking at a very young age.  Watching his Danish mother cook traditional Scandinavian food in their home in Key Biscayne, Fla. and traveling abroad with his father taught him early on that blending distinctive culinary styles is the key to creativity in the kitchen.

Ecker’s official training began while he was in high school, working as a busboy.  Noticing Ecker’s attention to detail and motivation to work hard, acclaimed south Florida chef Michael Chiarello took Ecker under his wing.  By the age of 18, Ecker was already a kitchen manager, having progressed through the ranks from pantry to broiler to sauté to purchasing.  While working alongside Chiarello at south Florida’s Toby’s Restaurant, Ecker was able to interact with local farmers, specifying produce orders and creating eclectic dishes based on fresh local ingredients.

To broaden his culinary horizons, Ecker then moved to Max’s Place, where he worked with another acclaimed chef, Mark Milatello. Considered the father of south Florida’s culinary movement, Milatello introduced Ecker to exotic Caribbean influences, on which he had built his reputation in the Miami restaurant scene.

After spending his entire young life in Florida, wanderlust then set in for Ecker. As luck would have it, his former mentor, Michael Chiarello, had moved to California’s Napa Valley region to open a new restaurant, Tra Vigne. Chiarello asked Ecker to join him as Sous Chef for the opening of the restaurant.  Concurrently, Ecker filled in as sous chef for Tra Vigne’s sister restaurants, the Fog City Diner in San Francisco and Mustard’s Grill in Napa.

During this time, Ecker further developed his expertise in fine Italian cuisine. And at Mustard’s Grill, he was also able to tend a garden, quite literally. The key element to Mustard’s Grill’s success was a one-and-a-half acre garden that existed solely to produce the finest and freshest ingredients for the menu each night and was tended to by Ecker and his staff. The daily hard work involved with growing a variety of produce, including basil, heirloom tomatoes, corn, framboise and several varieties of lettuce, combined with daily selections from San Francisco’s fresh fish markets to make Mustard’s Grill a Napa Valley success.

From Mustard’s Grill, Ecker took a short sojourn to Aspen, Colo., where he worked as chef at both Andiamo’s and Il Poggio. But the wrath of the often-harsh Rocky Mountain winters eventually made the Florida native opt to move back to the Napa Valley, this time to enter the hotel scene, working for the 230-acre Meadowood Resort in St. Helena, Calif., as Executive Sous Chef.

At Meadowood Resort, Ecker oversaw food preparation for the 1991 and 1992 Napa Valley wine auction, a week-long event complete with private parties. The auction and luxury dining tents set up for the event served 1,500 food and wine patrons.

The next time opportunity knocked for Ecker, he was asked to come on board as Executive Chef at the Tennis Ranch on Camelback in Paradise Valley, Ariz. In this position, he helped to transform the resort from one that was oriented to family leisure vacations to a full-service property, complete with a new conference center.

Ecker then headed to the famed Salish Lodge in Snoqualmie, Wash., to be that property’s Executive Chef. While in this role he also entered the culinary-education scene, serving as guest speaker and Technical Advisor for three Puget Sound-area community and technical arts colleges. He also was active as a guest chef at the Bon Marché 5 Star Cooking School and Herbfarm, among others.

Surrounded by an enthusiastic group of talented professionals, while at the Salish Lodge Ecker experimented with game and focused on refining his own version of Pacific Northwest cuisine, using fresh local products and combining Pacific Rim and Mediterranean dishes for a unique Euro-Pacific culinary style. He also developed working relationships with local organic growers, creating custom lettuce mixes and seasonal planting schedules. His creative style became nationally recognized, and in 1995 and 1996, The James Beard Foundation invited him to New York as one of its guest chefs.

In March 2000, Ecker found his way back to Colorado, this time to Denver’s warmer climate. He served as Executive Chef of the distinguished Inverness Hotel and Golf Club, including the Swan, an AAA Four Diamond™ restaurant. Ecker was voted top Chef in Denver by the readers of 5280 Magazine in 2001.

In February of 2002, he was asked to participate as a production Chef for the James Beard Foundation’s “Art of the Table” dinner series at the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah. In this role, he coordinated and produced 17 dinners with 53 of the nation’s top James Beard Chefs.

After the Olympics, Ecker returned to the Puget Sound area, where he started down an entrepreneurial path with a restaurant consulting company, Pro Kitchen Concepts and North Woods Catering.

In February 2006, Ecker accepted the opportunity to take his current role as Food and Beverage Director/Executive Chef with the Black Butte Ranch in Oregon. While at Black Butte, he has worked closely with Charles Kingsbaker, Director of Sales and Marketing, and other Black Butte Ranch managers to direct the successful repositioning and expansion of the property’s food-and-beverage program (“Destination Dining,” Club & Resort Business, October 2010).

Ecker also currently serves as the chapter President for the High Desert Chefs Association, and as an Advisory Committee member to the High Cascade Culinary Institute.

Olivier Andreini, CMC Executive Chef Merion Cricket Club Haverford, Pa.

Oliver Andreini, CMC, is an award-winning chef who was born in Switzerland and completed his culinary apprenticeship at the Hotel Montreux-Palace in Montreux, Switzerland. Chef Andreini has been a professor in culinary arts at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., for the past ten years. As a Certified Master Chef, he has achieved the highest level of professional classification in American culinary arts and is one of 62 chefs in the U.S. with this prestigious certification.

In his role as Executive Chef at Merion Cricket Club, Chef Andreini directs the food-and-beverage operation at one of the Philadelphia area’s oldest and most distinguished and unique club properties. The Merion Cricket Club traces its roots to 1865, when 15 young men who lived outside of Philadelphia, ranging in age from 14 to 22, signed an agreement to create a cricket club where they would commit to play matches at least once a week. Grounds were obtained near a railroad station, and the club’s original entrance fee was set at four dollars, with quarterly dues of 30 cents.

The popularity of the club led to acquisition of larger grounds in 1873 and the chartering of the club in 1874. The club expanded to include lawn tennis in 1879 and eventually to even larger grounds, in the club’s current location of Haverford, in 1892-93. After two serious clubhouse fires, Merion Cricket’s current main building, designed by famed Philadelphia architect Frank Furness, was opened in 1897; it underwent major renovations and expansions in the 1920s but still stands today as a Philadelphia “Main Line” landmark, with its distinctive red roof and red brick walls with green trim,  that looks largely the same as when first built.

As the club continued to grow, soccer, golf, field hockey, badminton, bowling, platform tennis and squash were added as additional recreational offerings, with separate golf courses being developed and opened in 1912 and 1914. These would become the famous East and West courses of Merion Golf Club, which was split off as a separate club in 1942.

Merion Cricket has continued to thrive on its own as a family club “established to provide its members with excellent facilities and programs encouraging all levels of participation in sports and other activities, while at the same time enabling them to socialize in an attractive environment providing first-class food and beverage service.” Chef Andreini now directs that service out of Merion Cricket’s iconic clubhouse, overseeing an operation that encompasses a wide range of regular social and business events, in addition to day-to-day member dining.

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