OVER THE COURSE OF A STAY at Kessler Canyon, a luxury 23,000-acre mountain ranch near DeBeque, Colo., guests find themselves gravitating toward Executive Chef Leonard McNab’s kitchen to gab or help make one of the evening’s gourmet dishes. He’s patient, talented, hilarious and absolutely outrageous, but most of all, McNab has a gift for living big.
His career path is fodder for reality television-in fact he recently was on Food Network’s new Guy’s Grocery Games. As a young teen in New Hampshire, McNab filled in washing dishes one night at a local restaurant. The $100 in his pocket and seeing a restaurant kitchen in action made him, “vow to be a cook someday,” he recalls.
By age 15, his parents agreed to home schooling so he could work as a cook. A stint as a medic in the U.S. Army landed him in Germany, where he later returned and met chef Klaus Pertack, who took him in as an apprentice and sent him to culinary school in Bad Kissingen.
Along the way, life led McNab to Nashville to figure out how to be a country singer and to the Grand Canyon, when an empty wallet and broken-down pickup left him just short of Las Vegas. McNab was a mule guide before spending two seasons as a chuck wagon cook for cowboys rounding up cattle for O RO Ranch near Prescott, Ariz.
At Kessler Canyon, he not only has the freedom to create the full dining experience for guests, McNab also taps his alter ego, The Black Mamba. He trades a chef’s apron for an ornately patterned black jacket and sings tunes that keep guests chuckling.
“I feel like it’s my own bed-and-breakfast,” he says, “and I’m having a dinner party with my friends.”
