A Scotsman to his core, Douglas Anderson, executive chef of Seasons at the Four Seasons Hotel, still considers himself all-American. Born in Scotland and raised in Illinois in a Scots-centric home, Anderson learned early on that, as he says, “Food is everything in a European family. … That’s how we identify ourselves. We [our family] had lamb and barley for breakfast.” Perhaps to underscore his Americanness, however, the teenaged Anderson decided he wanted a dirt bike, and to earn the money to buy it he got a job in a Chinese restaurant kitchen. “I started cooking at the age of 15,” he said. “The work was very theatrical, all the insanity of woks, cutting vegetables, peeling shrimp. But my Dad let me do it because the job made sense.”
After graduating from high school, Anderson entered the Coast Guard. As fate would have it, he attended the Coast Guard’s Food Service “A” School in Petaluma, Calif. “I spent four months learning to cook soft-shell crab and other stuff you’d never see on a cutter,” he recalled.
