No Ceiling Season 3 Guest: Melinda Burrows

Local women share their journey to the top of their professions and the challenges and triumphs they faced along the way. They’re rewriting the script on success and there’s no ceiling.

Melinda Burrows is my guest on the eighth episode of No Ceiling, Season 3. She’s had a love of food her whole life. That passion has sent her around the world, cooking for Paul McCartney, Phil Collins and INXS while on tour, to name a few, and preparing private dinners for Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston and George Clooney. In recent years, Melinda has worked as an executive chef and earned the elite title of certified executive chef from the American Culinary Federation. She says it’s her love of ingredients and the connection of food that keeps her excited about the profession. In this episode, we talk about her storied life in the culinary arts, her recent departure from the kitchen at Hickory Hills Country Club and her next career move.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation.

Christine Temple: Let’s go back to your childhood. What are some of the meals that really stick out to you, and who made them for you?
Melinda Burrows: I’m Mexican on both sides of my family. I had a wonderful, amazing grandmother. She was an amazing cook. We lived in Seattle; she was in Corpus Christi. I would see her in the summertime. Being in her house, there’s a smell of cumin and garlic and black pepper – this mix she always used in all of her cooking. She would use her molcajete, which is like a mortar and pestle, and that smell was in her meat, her carne guisada, her rice. You just stepped into her kitchen and that smell was there and that feeling of comfort and being home. I also loved to bake. We had a cookbook in our house, the Better Homes and Gardens. I would pick things out of there and bake banana bread or zucchini bread. I was always wanting to do something in the kitchen, and that just translated at one point, realizing that that made people happy and that created a sense of love and connection. That’s carried through my career as a chef.

Temple: Your career has taken you around the world traveling as … I don’t know exactly what it’s called – a tour chef?
Burrows: A rock and roll chef.

Temple: Talk about where you were when that first opportunity came about for you to go on a tour.
Burrows: That was summer of 1990. I was working at the Stimson-Green Mansion and trying to finish up that semester of culinary school. Paul McCartney was coming to town. In cities, what will happen is that the production company is rounding up people to help to be runners, help the production crew. Paul McCartney had Eat Your Heart Out catering; they were based in London. They needed help going shopping, doing prep and cooking and setup. I was in charge of helping the catering people go around shopping. I’m just a very resourceful person, and the owner, Debbie Sharpe, who now is in Chicago, toward the end of the week she said, “Would you like to go on the rest of the tour with us? I think you’d be a great asset.” And I said, yeah, I’d love to go. I said to the mansion, I’m going to go on tour with Paul McCartney for the rest of the summer.

Related: No Ceiling from SBJ Podcasts