Kenny Gilbert, who is in the midst of the new season of 'Top Chef', took over as PGA National's executive chef earlier in July.

Kenny Gilbert was about 3 years old when his culinary passions fired up — quite literally so. It happened one day as his mother sewed in the basement of their family home near Cleveland, and as his baby brother fidgeted in his crib.

An energetic child, Kenny barreled into the kitchen, where there was a roast cooking in the oven. He grabbed a dish towel from the oven door and somehow pulled out the roast. And as he did this, the frayed edge of the towel snagged on the oven coils.

The ruckus of his mischief and the smoky wafts from the oven reached the basement and Carlotta Gilbert, a clothing designer and keen pragmatist, bolted from her sewing machine to the rescue.

She turned off the oven, retrieved the towel and inspected her roast: it was perfectly done. She realized she had two choices — she could teach her son a punishing lesson that could scare him out of the kitchen for good, or she could teach him to cook.

Luckily for the culinary world, mom chose the latter, for that was the day Kenny Gilbert — now a standout contestant on Bravo TV’s Top Chef D.C. and the new executive chef at the PGA National Resort & Spa — became a cook.

Under his mother’s tutelage, he learned how to work the knobs on kitchen appliances, how to scramble an egg, how to respect the kitchen and love the meals he could create there.

“She showed me how to turn all the knobs on and off. She showed me everything about the kitchen. She just nurtured something in me,” recalls Gilbert, 36, who started work two weeks ago at PGA National, the AAA Four Diamond resort in Palm Beach Gardens.

These were lessons enhanced by outdoor grilling sessions with dad, the late Carle Gilbert, and fueled by sibling culinary rivalry with younger brother, Kirk, who also grew up to be a chef. (He’s an executive chef at the Palmetto Bluff resort in South Carolina.) By the time Kenny was 11 years old, the boy chef was the chief cook at the family’s Thanksgiving dinner.

Gilbert would go on to greatly refine his kitchen skills, from home-ec classes in middle and high school to cooking classes in vocational school to flipping burgers on “the fast-food tour” to the Pennsylvania Institute of Culinary Arts.

The training and persistence landed him a series of distinguished posts. At 23, he commanded the kitchen of the Ritz-Carlton resort in Amelia Island as the AAA Five Diamond resort’s youngest executive chef. Nearly a decade later, he landed in Palm Beach County as executive chef at The Ritz-Carlton Golf Club & Spa in Jupiter.

Thanks to his fine-dining chops, Gilbert out-performed his Top Chef competitors on Episode 1, when the 17 “cheftestants” raced through an obstacle course of food prep, peeling and slicing and brunoise-ing. From the start, Gilbert, the beefy, self-proclaimed “alpha male” of the cast, emerged as a fierce competitor with a style that is as soulful as it is refined.

This is the essence of his cooking.

“I describe my food as international cuisine with a Southern influence,” says Gilbert, who came to Palm Beach Gardens from the Capella Telluride resort in Colorado, where he was executive chef. “There’s a comfort food element to what I do. I could be serving a guest seafood from the Mediterranean sea — a sea bass he’s never heard of before — and I’ll serve it with an aged white cheddar grits. And it won’t be a massive portion, but one that is portioned perfectly.”

His own idea of a weeknight comfort dinner is one rooted not in the South, but in his love of Asian cuisines. His go-to meal: pad Thai with chicken or shrimp.

“I do a lot of Thai food. I tend to go to the Asian market and stock up on rice noodles and different kinds of curries,” says Gilbert, who also owns and operates his own food and beverage consulting and training business, Passionate Culinary Enterprises.

One of his favorite local haunts, in fact, is the Fortune Cookie Oriental Market on Forest Hill Boulevard in Palm Springs.

“I could walk around there for hours, picking up bottles and looking at the labels. Then I bring it home and play around with the ingredients,” he says.

At home awaits one of his most discerning diners — his daughter Adrienna.

“She has a very excellent palate. She’s almost 17 and she loves all kinds of food. She’ll ask, ‘Daddy, what are you making for dinner?’ Then she’ll just lay it out there — she knows what she wants,” says the chef, who now oversees all menus and food concepts at the PGA resort’s dining venues, including its fine-dining restaurant, Ironwood Grille.

His guests at PGA can expect fresh food created with gusto, says Gilbert.

“My goal is to bring a sustainable and organic feel to the property,” he says. “I’ll be working to train and develop the staff and get everyone really excited about food.”

His biggest message to his new staff: “Feel the love in the food.”

It’s his daily mantra, he says — “It’s what my parents taught me.”

Chef Kenny Gilbert’s Edamame with Preserved Lemon and Cumin

1 cup edamame in the shell

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon whole cumin

1 teaspoon preserved lemon*

Chopped Kosher salt to taste

Heat olive oil in sauté pan, medium heat.

Add cumin and toast.

Add preserved lemon and sweat the lemon, about 1 minute.

Add edamame and cook until hot.

Sprinkle with the coarse salt.

* Preserved, or pickled, lemon can be found in specialty food markets.

WATCH CHEF KENNY
Top Chef: Washington D.C. airs tonight on Bravo TV. The winner of the reality TV competition will be crowned ‘Top Chef’ and receive $125,000 from Dial NutriSkin, a feature in Food & Wine magazine and a showcase at the annual Food & Wine Classic in Aspen.

TASTE THE CUISINE
At the PGA National Resort & Spa,
400 Avenue of the Champions, Palm Beach Gardens. Visit www.pgaresort.com or call (800) 533-9386.