Executive Chef Robert McCormick at The Hotel Hana-Maui

A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, McCormick has led a charmed professional life starting with his first job out of school. An unexpected stroke of luck landed him at Seeger’s, the Atlanta restaurant of Guenter Seeger, where he became the protégé of the acclaimed master chef. From there he went to Michel Richard’s Citronelle in Washington, DC, which was like a graduate course in French cooking technique. Then it was on to a six-month apprenticeship in northern Italy, for a crash course in fine dining with a rustic twist. Not long after he returned to the States, working as the lead line cook at 2 West at The Ritz-Carlton, Battery Park, Guenter Seeger tracked him down and asked him to be chef de cuisine at his new restaurant, Seeger’s at The Willcox, in Aiken, South Carolina. Honored and delighted by the chance to ‘come home’ to the man who had given him his formative training, McCormick jumped at the chance.

His next move was to Palm Beach, to work as sous chef under another legendary chef: Daniel Boulud, at Café Boulud -- before heading west to a three-year tenure as chef de cuisine at the Daniel Boulud Brasserie in Las Vegas. For the past year, McCormick has been Corporate Sous Chef with The Dinex Group in New York.

It was there that he was approached by Philip Wood, whose Arden Grove Hospitality Group had the promising young chef since his days at The Willcox, and his determination to bring a gifted professional to handle the food and beverage program at the resort led him right to McCormick.

If McCormick thought Aiken was isolated, that was before he encountered the remoteness of Hāna, on the undeveloped eastern shore of the lush island of Maui in the middle of the Pacific – a gorgeous two-hour drive from the principal airport.  When asked what decided him on the job, it wasn’t the chance to live in a tropical paradise; it wasn’t the title of executive chef.

“Meeting the people who provide ingredients was the big selling point,” he says, “they are so in to what they do, on a level that I’ve never experienced before.”  That must be the indefinable ‘Hāna spirit’ that pervades the atmosphere, natural to the locals and affecting most visitors before long. A sense of one-ness with nature, and by extension, a reverence for all plant and animal life, is a deep-seated Hawaiian trait; the cultivation of food is marked by a spiritual purpose, and locally in Hāna, the youth of the community are still taught to fish, regardless of their career expectations.

The broad scope of food and beverage at the 69-room resort presents an exciting new challenge to McCormick, with Ka’uiki, the fine dining restaurant; the Hāna Ranch Restaurant, a more casual eatery across the road; and the elegant Paniolo bar; as well as wedding banquets; private dinners; those exuberant lū`au down on nearby Hamoa Beach; and of course, room service. And the ingredients for it all are nearly 100% locally sourced. “It’s something to be very proud of – and extremely rare,” says McCormick.

McCormick brings a strict classical training to the kitchen of Hotel Hāna-Maui, and gently brings that experience to bear as he expands the à la carte menu of Ka`uiki with a market-inspired European approach to the strictly local ingredients. He lets his largely local staff take the lead on the classic Hawaiian dishes that are maintained at the forefront of the menu, however.“The hotel has an authenticity that we underscore with the cuisine, and the Hawaiian dishes are key to that. That said we’re continually looking for ways to bring a level of refinement and sophistication to all we do. My hope is that a guest who is here for five days will spend the first several trying our interpretations of the local specialties, and then maybe venture into, say, a French treatment of a (very!) local fish, or an Italian treatment of local beef.”