Highly honored chef practices and teaches his craft at Lee’s Summit supermarket

Mark Webster started his career as a cook in the Navy, which might be one reason he barely hunches over when maneuvering his lean, 6-foot, 3-inch frame — plus white toque — under the gleaming stainless-steel hood of his grill station.

The toque — a classic pleated chef’s hat — pushes his height to “7 foot-something.” He shrugs at the inconvenience.

“Not all kitchens wear ball caps,” he says. “I have never really cooked without a hat. It was the way I was brought up.”

On a recent Saturday, Webster wedges himself between the meat and seafood cases at the Hy-Vee Lee’s Summit West store and grills some Cedar-Planked Cod. He demos a different recipe at 1, 3 and 5 p.m. every Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

“I like the idea of grilling fish. I’m trying to stay away from fried foods,” says Octavia Jones of Lee’s Summit as she leans against her mostly empty cart and samples bites of moist, flaky fish embellished with bits of roasted asparagus.

Jones winds up asking for the recipe, and Webster points her to the aisle where she can buy the wooden planks.

Stepping into the supermarket express lane is just the latest curve in Webster’s culinary career. Later this month the highly decorated chef will travel to Michigan to be inducted into the Honorable Order of the Golden Toque, considered the highest recognition a classically trained chef can receive in the United States.

“I don’t own my own restaurant, and I haven’t won a James Beard award, and here I am,” Webster says, both honored and a bit flabbergasted by the nod from the other 99 chefs who make up the order and tightly control its membership.

The order was founded in France and brought to the United States in 1961 by chef Pierre Berard, who hoped the organization would promote professionalism in an industry that in those days was not highly regarded. The award is restricted to 100 chefs nationwide who have spent 20 years or more in the industry.

The only other Kansas City chef who has been inducted is Jess Barbosa, whose career spanned numerous decades at top hotels, including the Muehlebach, the Alameda Plaza and the downtown Marriott.

“For me, Jess is the godfather of the chefs in the kitchen world,” Webster says.

“You’ve got to have very, very strong credentials. I’m happy for him,” says Barbosa, who retired last year.

Webster graduated from Shawnee Mission West High School and went straight into the Navy. Except for three years spent as a boot camp drill instructor, he worked in Navy kitchens on destroyers and freighters, serving enlisted members and admirals, presidents and diplomats.

The Navy took him to ports of call ranging from Antarctica — where fresh foods were a rare luxury, and even the cabbage is dehydrated — to the Greek island of Crete, where Webster fell in love with the fresh flavors of a cuisine splashed with lemon juice and laced with mint.

When he was stationed stateside, Webster enrolled in cooking schools, including the Philadelphia Cooking School and Johnson & Wales. He quickly discovered he had been trained to be ready for whatever comes up in a professional kitchen, even if he didn’t necessarily know the French terms, such as mise en place (getting your ingredients prepped before starting a recipe) or the difference between julienne (a thin strip) or brunoise (meticulously tiny cubes) knife cuts.

“Out at sea, we trained in pastry and everything else,” Webster says. “We even put pork loins in brine to make our own Canadian bacon.”

When he retired from the Navy at age 37, he earned a bachelor’s degree in business and continued his culinary trek, eventually taking the helm of the New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park for a decade. He also served as the president of the Greater Kansas City Chefs Association twice and continues to serve on its board. He has received awards from the American Culinary Federation, and he periodically has taught as an adjunct at Johnson County Community College’s culinary program.

But almost two years ago the demands of a chef’s life — routinely working long days, nights, weekends and holidays — were taking their toll on his family life with his wife, Venus, and 10-year-old daughter, Abigail. When Steve Culbertson, a store manager at Hy-Vee, contacted the local chefs association to get help finding the right person for the supermarket job, Webster was at first hesitant, then began to see the advantages of working a day job that afforded greater flexibility and family time.

Still, he had initial doubts about making the leap: “I wanted to be sure that they were looking for a chef, not just someone who was wearing a chef jacket.”

In fact, the Des Moines-based Hy-Vee chain has been hiring the real deal for several years.

“We’re competing with restaurants, so we have to teach people so they can do things themselves at home,” Culbertson says.

As a supermarket chef, Webster sets his own schedule, and he is able to use any product that strikes his fancy, from Peruvian potatoes to truffle oil, that is stocked by the store without worrying about how ingredient costs figure into the bottom line.

Giant “Chef Mark” posters are hung around the store, and his silhouette graces his own brand of coffee. He’ll be featured in the August/September issue of Seasons, a slick quarterly food magazine that Hy-Vee produces to promote recipes, products and trends.

A Ferran Adrià geek who loves to talk molecular gastronomy, he has whipped up lobster foam for an in-store Scotch tasting, but he can also relate to the more casual cook who has just discovered the joys of seasoning with herbes de Provence.

“I thought, ‘If I do this, am I still part of the culinary world?’” he recalls.

But he soon found he was in the public eye more now than many chefs who own their own restaurants: “Name a restaurant where you can go into the kitchen and see how I really do it.”

Sure, some customers may only stop by to help themselves to free samples of the made-from-scratch barley-mushroom soup that warms in the slow cooker, but just as often Webster finds himself interacting with a customer. One recent Saturday a man takes him up on his offer to get behind the grill and test the doneness of fish using a pair of tongs.

“He’s just like a walking dictionary,” marvels another regular shopper, Sharon Cupito of Independence, who goes out of her way to shop at the store.

Across town, Leo Geismar, a sous chef of the New Theatre Restaurant who considers himself more of a “baseball hat kind of guy,” fondly recalls most of their workday conversations centered around Webster’s international travel. Add Webster’s deep technical skills coupled with an even temperament, and Geismar thinks his friend and colleague has found the place to drop anchor.

“I think Hy-Vee is a perfect spot for him, because he likes to interact and teach,” Geismar says. “He’s very low-key, even-tempered. He’s just a really nice guy and easy to get along with.”

Back at the store, Webster stoops down once again.

“I do wear a tall toque, so I’m ducking all the time because of my hood system,” Webster says.

But the toque is also becoming a sort trademark for the next generation of shoppers — even if most of them don’t have the foggiest idea what it means to the culinary world: “I have 3-year-olds who just want to wave at me in my tall hat.”

This story was originally published June 9, 2015 at 5:00 AM.