Here’s a riddle: What’s more than seven feet tall, has the eyes of a Siberian husky and knows more about food than Betty Crocker?

    If you said “a Certified Master Chef,” you’d be right. It’s CMC Derin Moore, to be exact—and he’s actually 6 feet 4 inches without his 10-inch white chef’s toque. You’d be hard-pressed to find Chef Moore, executive chef at The Ritz-Carlton Resorts of Naples, out of his toque. Between the golf and beach resorts, The Ritz has 19 dining outlets and serves between 2,500 and 5,000 meals daily in season. For the past two years, Chef Moore has overseen a 150-member culinary team. And oh, what a team it is.  
    Lest you think anyone with a spatula can achieve CMC status, think again. According to the American Culinary Federation (ACF), “The CMC level is the highest and most demanding level of achievement … granted only after the candidate has passed an intensive eight-day test of culinary skills and knowledge.” Candidates are advised “to be physically and mentally prepared to perform eight days under extreme pressure.” There are fewer than 70 CMCs in America. In essence, they’re the Navy Seals of the culinary world.  
    I was granted the privilege of shadowing Chef Moore, whose imposing height and heft would make him equally at home in the Michigan Wolverines huddle. “I ate one of the best meals of my life here,” I said, shaking his massive hand.
    “Have you eaten?” Moore asked. I shook my head. Who in her right mind would eat before going to The Ritz? “Good,” he said. “You’ll eat the way chefs eat, standing up and running from kitchen to kitchen.”
    “I interviewed a chef who used to work here,” I gushed, “and I’ll never forget what he told me. He spent over $100,000 on shipping alone one year.” Moore frowned. “He FedExed truffles from France,” I ended lamely.  
    “It’s not like that anymore,” he said, “and it doesn’t need to be. I don’t think it shows a lot of talent to cook foie gras or truffles or caviar. That’s what God gave us; you’re not doing anything as a craftsman. Now, using charcuterie [techniques], or making braised lamb shank to break down the collagen, these things take skill.” If I’d hoped to hear stories of extravagance, I’d picked the wrong moment. Nobody wants to spotlight luxury in a bad economy.

    We started in the chef’s private office, a narrow space with massive windows overlooking two separate kitchens. Within seconds, The Grill chef appeared, holding a dish of fennel-dusted cod with lobster hollandaise. He stood at attention while Moore took two bites before handing me the plate. The dish seemed excellent to me, but Moore made suggestions.  “I’m extremely hands-on in the kitchen,” he explained to me. “I taste just about everything, every day.”  
    Just then, a special events manager surfaced with questions about a banquet for bankers scheduled for May. I nibbled the cod furtively. While they talked, Moore handed me a six-inch binder to peruse on the hotel’s newest restaurant, Bites.
    “Banquets account for 60 percent of our annual revenue in dining,” Moore told me, “and dining accounts for about 20 percent of the hotel’s overall revenues. A big part of my job is to go over menus and pricing. We want people to feel special, so we work with them, no matter what size the budget. Proteins are where your money comes in; with the current economy, that’s where you need creativity. What can we do to have that same black-tie feel?” Apparently, even some bankers have to economize these days.  
    We were interrupted by the director of guest relations, who looked rattled.  “You know that thing from before?” she whispered, and the chef nodded. “Well, now our guest wants to come for 10 days instead of two. Can we accommodate him?” Could it be Brad Pitt, I wondered, or Obama?
    “Don’t worry,” Moore said. “We’ll take care of his whole amenities package, from arrival to turn-down. Just tell me his schedule, when he’ll be boating or whatever.”  
    “You probably can’t say who it is,” I said, “but could you at least say if it’s animal, vegetable or mineral? A movie star? A politician?”
“We try to make sure every guest has an enjoyable stay,” came the director’s corporate reply. Would The Ritz be The Ritz if it exposed its VIPs to the press?
    As soon as we were alone, I let a torrent of questions tumble forth. “What does it take to cook delicious food for thousands of people, and to do it 24-7? Where do your ideas come from? Did you always know you wanted to be a chef? I know you’ve lived in Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina. How does Naples compare to other places?”
    “To get to the top in this industry, you have to make a lot of moves and put in 15-, 16-hour days. I have a wife and three kids, and this is our seventh home. I’m a Midwestern guy, so this time of year is a little difficult for me. I like venison stews, but I don’t miss black ice on the roads. What’s great is that the summers were our busiest time up North, whereas here, I can actually take time off when my kids are out of school.”  

    Family is key for chef Moore. He’s from Michigan, but he learned how and why to cook from his maternal grandfather in New York, a man who used to dash home after church on Sundays in a “big old house in Buffalo with a nice-sized garden” and cook for 20 hungry Catholic relatives and friends. Moore went to the Culinary Institute of America straight out of high school and graduated at the tender age of 19.  
    “I tell all of the young people who work for me, ‘Give up the money for five to seven years and find a place that isn’t glamorous, with water on the floor, poor lighting, one pair of tongs that everybody gets in early to fight over, but a chef driving you to be better every single day. Somebody to teach you technically sound cooking.’”  
    “Do you drive everyone here?” I asked. “Do you ever yell like the chefs on TV?”
    “That’s not real,” he said. “First, I always hire good attitudes, not experience. You’re not going to see me yelling. You can’t develop a team that wants to follow you if you’re degrading them. Now, you’re not going to see me let something go if it isn’t right. It’s just mentoring and teaching. I’ll pick up a knife and show someone the right way to do it. Just this morning, I worked the line at the Terrace. I think it meant a lot to the guys working there.”   
    “I notice you’ve got a calendar from The Chef’s Garden,” I said.
    “Yes, we order from them,” he said. “That’s where some ideas come from: You think of the season and what sort of ingredients will be available. What makes a dish special is the depth of flavor. In a lot of places, it’s just the burn of salt on the tip of your tongue. In a good restaurant, it’s layer upon layer. You can taste the skill.”
    “Are all of the recipes here yours?” I asked as we walked into the banquet kitchen.
    “It’s all my food,” he said. “Some of the dishes are from Lawrence [McFadden, his predecessor, a fellow CMC and the current hotel manager], like the hummus we serve by the pool. Some things are so good, why change them?”
    Moore begins each day with leadership team meetings. “They come with questions. ‘How do we make it?  How do we plate it?’ The reputation of our culinary program is why they’re here,” he said. “It’s how we’re able to attract this talent.” Once a week in the off-season, he holds “mystery basket tastings,” in which someone is given four hours to make a dish with the contents of a basket, and then Moore evaluates the results. “Two of our sous chefs left us and then came back. That’s the best, because they appreciate what they have.”  

    I appreciated the saucier’s habitat: the kitchen devoted to soups and sauces. Everything at The Ritz is made from scratch. They butcher their own meat from larger cuts; they bake all of the bread, croutons, cakes and pastries; they make their own ice cream; and nothing, not even the salad dressings, contains any sort of mix. Chef Moore asked for a couple of spoons, and the two of us dipped into a large vat of clam chowder.  
    “This is a little salty,” he told the line cook. “Just one cup of chicken stock would mellow that out. You have to think from the guest’s perspective. One spoonful might be OK, but a whole cup? What would that feel like?” We sampled the contents of the next vat: chicken soup. “OK,” he said, “this one doesn’t have enough salt. If only we could take the salt from the chowder and put it in the chicken soup!” The cooks gathered around Moore, and he addressed one. “Where are you from, South Africa?”
“Yes, Chef,” he replied. All night, people said the words, “Yes, Chef,” with accents. He was right about hiring good attitudes, from around the globe.
    “When you go home, you’ll know how to cook.”
    “You want to catch people doing things right,” Chef Moore said to me, “but also, you want to protect the guests. We’re always asking, what can we do better than yesterday? We cook what our customers want. This is a big lesson for the young guys who want creativity. There’s nothing wrong with a simple piece of fish, a good hamburger, etc. CEOs come to Naples to wear flip-flops. Fine dining doesn’t have to be stuffy.”  
    I wondered aloud if anyone ever buckled under the pressure.
    “I tell everyone, I want to know before you get killed. If your manager just seated a full dining room, and there are a hundred open menus ...”
    Next, we toured the garde manger (cooling room). A line cook showed the chef an appetizer with tomatoes. “Good, but keep everything one inch from the rims,” he advised. “Artists don’t paint on the frames.”  
    “Where do you find real tomatoes?” I asked.  
    “We get them from Immokalee,” he said. “It’s all about relationships.”
    Moore rotates people often. “We have casual, fine dining, high volume. Basically, it’s a career under one building. You can become fully rounded at a place like this.” I had imagined Chef Moore as an admiral or an auto executive, but he’s the hard-working, caring dean of a graduate school in fine dining.  
    As we galloped along, even checking the employees’ dining room—“the key to keeping employees happy is through their stomachs”—I learned that Moore makes these rounds five to six times almost every day. He should be given roller skates with his BlackBerry. I asked how he kept up this pace. “I don’t like sitting still.”   
    “How do you make sure everything tastes right if you have a cold?”
    “You can tell a lot by looking and listening. For example, if a pan isn’t hot enough, you’ll hear it.”
    He pointed out the pin lighting over the outdoor tables in the sushi bar. We heard the Gulf and felt a cool breeze. “You see, it’s about all of the senses. I want to see what my guests see, feel what my guests feel.”  
    There’s no way to walk the grounds of The Ritz and not feel extravagantly happy. As we made our way toward the beachfront Gumbo Limbo, Moore gestured toward the beautifully lit swimming pool. “This is my office.” His face filled with delight.