March 3, 2025
426: Crafting Exceptional Club Dining Experiences w/ Chef Matthew Gilbert - Medinah Country Club
Some people are great chefs. Some are great leaders. Matt Gilbert is both.
As the Executive Chef at Medinah Country Club, Matt isn’t just running one of the most well-known kitchens in private clubs—he’s leading a team, creating unforgettable dining experiences, and setting a new standard for club cuisine.
But beyond the accolades, the high-pressure events, and the five-star menus, Matt is just a genuinely great person. He leads with humility, passion, and a deep respect for his team, knowing that the best food comes from a kitchen where people feel valued.
In this episode, we talk about:
*How he went from fine dining and Michelin-starred restaurants to private clubs.
*What it really takes to run a high-volume, high-expectation club kitchen.
*The biggest lessons he’s learned about leadership, teamwork, and keeping a cool head under pressure.
*How Medinah balances tradition with innovation in its food & beverage program.
Matt is the kind of leader who gives credit before he takes it and builds people up while delivering world-class experiences. If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to run an elite club kitchen—or just want to hear from one of the best in the business—this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
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00:00 - Medina Country Club Dining Insights
12:22 - Culinary Club Environment and Member Relations
22:30 - Culinary Challenges and International Work
29:16 - Cross-Cultural Culinary Challenges and Connections
34:28 - Medina Club Culinary Development Update
WEBVTT
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Hey everybody, welcome to the Private Club Radio Show, where we give you the scoop on all things private golf and country clubs, from mastering leadership and management, food and beverage excellence, member engagement secrets, board governance and everything in between, all while keeping it fun and light.
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Whether you're a club veteran just getting your feet wet or somewhere in the middle, you are in the right place.
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I'm your host, denny Corby.
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Welcome to the show.
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In this episode, I am chatting with the executive chef and director of food and beverage operations at one of the most top tier clubs in the world Medina Country Club, because there's club dining and then there's Medina Club Dining and we chat with Matt Gilbert, who gives us the behind-the-scenes look at showing what it takes to make sure Medina's F&B program lives up to the club's legendary reputation.
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We go over Matt's background, coming from a very small town in the middle of nowhere to working with Michelin star restaurants and top-tier chefs from Hong Kong to Cairo, all over the world, and now bringing all of that to Medina.
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He's bringing that experience into private clubs, creating menus that balance fine dining, casual favorites and large scale event production.
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I mean, this episode is so, so good and he is such a good human.
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I got to meet him as well.
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We connected more in person at CMA, a world conference, and oh, this is so good.
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I hope we get to have a couple more conversations, but we talked just about how he transitioned from restaurants to private clubs, the biggest challenges of running a high volumeexpectation club kitchen and what members really want from their club dining experience.
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So if you want to hear about some next-level food and beverage at top-tier clubs, this is the episode for you.
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Before we get into the episode, a quick thanks, a quick shout-out to some of our show partners, who you're going to hear about a little bit later.
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We have Members First Kennes, member Vetting and Golf Life Navigators, concert Golf Partners, as well as myself.
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The Denny Corby Experience.
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There's excitement, there's mystery.
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Also there's magic, mind-reading, comedy and a ton of crowd work.
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If you or your club is looking for one of the most fun member event nights, head on over to dennycorbycom to learn a little bit more.
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Enough about that, though.
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Let's get to the episode.
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I'm super stoked All the way from Medina Country Club, the executive chef and director of food and beverage operations.
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Let's welcome to the show, matthew Gilbert.
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How's Medina been?
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You've been there how many years now?
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Yeah, so I started just before Thanksgiving in 2019.
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And I love it.
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I love it.
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I started as their, their chef uh, at that time, just executive chef, and then in my career, until really 16 months ago, um hadn't done uh, F and B director stuff.
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It was all just chef for 32 years, Um, but my first four years there, four and a half years, were as the chef, and my predecessor was awesome.
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Uh, chef Michael Ponzio.
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He did a great job, Um, but definitely he and I have different styles and so taking the club in the direction that, um, I felt I wanted to do or we wanted to do, uh, took a long time.
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It took a few years to get the team built.
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Um, right after I got there, COVID started.
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You know, which is everyone has their COVID story.
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For me it was very interesting, like landing there and it was like the fanfare of the holidays and I was just learning the ropes and all of a sudden it was kind of like show us what you can do.
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And then we closed, you know, for a long time, but we took advantage of that time.
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You know, my belief is, no matter what's going on in the world tough things or easy things we got to do cool stuff.
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I'll talk a little bit today about my philosophy about clubs as a chef and the things that we should do, but we took advantage of that period of time to do some really awesome stuff that defined somewhat of what our future became with regard to like a butcher to go program, which was very strong.
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We had a food truck program, a smoker program that started during that period of time.
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So by the time, you know, COVID ended, everyone was.
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We didn't even really know each other as well as I wanted to on a personal level because everybody was stuck at home or whatever, or we were outdoors, you know, because of the restrictions of being indoors, but we had established a lot during that time.
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So, even though that was kind of a period that was weird for everybody, like for me at Medina, it was awesome.
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So Medina is an awesome club, Like I love being there.
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I feel very honored to be a part of that.
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We have a fantastic membership, so yeah, all things are good.
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I got to come visit when the NCA show was in Chicago.
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Okay, what was when the ncaa show was in chicago?
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okay, what was that three years ago, two years ago, yeah, two, two years ago, something like that.
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It's all blended together now at this point, but um, yeah, no, um.
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So yeah, it was a, it was awesome.
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You guys went out of your way.
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I mean, there was just like it.
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There was, you know, nothing held back, it was stations.
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It was so good.
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When the bus was leaving, I was like no stuff in my pocket, shrimp and stuff.
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It was no.
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Yeah, no, we do.
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That's one of the things at Medina and probably a lot of clubs are like this.
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But everything is very you know, and I was listening to, actually I think his name was Nicholas Gora, it was a GM you had on at one point.
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I was enjoying that episode because he was.
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You all were talking about the challenges of, you know, getting a chef to work in a club environment.
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I've been through all the stages of of like the chef.
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You know, you're, you're young and like my 20 year old self, wouldn't have dreamed of working in a club.
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You know, just that's where a creative chef goes goes to die.
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Basically is what I thought.
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And then did you know it was all freestanding restaurants and Michelin stuff that I was aiming for at the time and then got into hotels and eventually clubs and what I'd say now, definitively in my 40s.
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You know, to be a club chef is the hardest of any kind of chef because you just really need to be well-rounded.
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It's not about you at that point.
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So you have to really overcome your ego and I think that's kind of what he was saying.
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There is a lot of times chefs coming in to really overcome your ego and I think that's kind of what he was saying there.
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A lot of times chefs come in and it's about you most of the time as a chef right, like your identity and your personality are what sells stuff, but in the club that's not what it is.
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So I think finding your footing in a club has a lot to do with understanding your membership, developing a rapport, taking the time to meet everybody and understand what they like before you start to build things, the time to meet everybody and understand what they like before you start to build things.
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So what I've learned as a long-winded answer to your question at Medina we love bespoke menus, like we have a great banquet book.
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In my third year here, I redid all the banquet menus.
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I feel like it's awesome and it's totally like what our members love.
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But, that said, we design almost everything not almost everything, but a large percentage of what we do is custom, and so what you experienced that day was certainly a one-off.
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Our banquet team is so versed in doing different things literally every day and building that takes time, but once you have it, it's awesome, because what you experienced was a bunch of different stations and live cook stuff.
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We have what I refer to as the fleet, which is all just fire powered equipment.
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You know that we can move around and do awesome stuff grills and smokers and Santa Maria grills and pizza ovens and stuff like that.
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So, yeah, that's what Medina is all about.
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You know, my lens is doing awesome stuff for our members.
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What they want to do is what we build programs based off of, and then when folks like you or you know, club managers or whoever visit the club, we want to show that part of our identity to you too, because, uh, you know we're peers and we're all out there doing doing cool stuff.
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So I'm glad to experience that.
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Are you getting into conference?
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Uh, wednesday midday.
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Okay, I'm missing your party.
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I only brought that.
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It was one of those.
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I just wanted to make sure, because tomorrow Nick Gore is joining us for dinner also.
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Oh, is he really?
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Oh man, yeah, I would love to meet him.
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I would love to meet him.
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I love what he was saying because certainly, like you know, we're like these mythical creatures that you're trying to tame.
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You know chefs are such weird and I probably pissed a lot of chefs off by saying this, but you know there's a lot of ego involved, usually in my way or the highway, and so, for a club environment, you know you're building something for the membership, you have to really get beyond.
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You know what you want to do and the way I think about it is like tailoring our skills to what they want to have.
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And so it's fun to listen to him.
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You know there's so many things that I like hear him wanting to say that he can't really say but yeah, fine, and I'm glad that they did.
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I think they promoted from inside and that's.
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That's a pretty good move if you're having a hard time finding people from outside and a lot of times, like, you'll bring in big names or like big you know awesome people from other parts of the industry and it's and it's a tough fit like if they can adapt.
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My, my, when I adapted was I was in cairo at um, and I like the most important thing and I think to be well-rounded, like I said, as a chef in a club not like egypt, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, I was like I was there for three years with with the, the fairmont raffles group, right and getting out of freestanding restaurant into into um hotel world too.
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That was a big shift.
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So I started with the Mandarin Oriental in San Francisco and I got in there and I wanted to just work for this like kind of star chef.
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I was doing Pacific room cuisine in San Francisco and the deal that their executive sous chef made with me when I was getting in the door he's like all right, I'll let you work with that guy, but you also have to agree to work in banquets when we need you and young chefs like, especially when you're an a la carte or a Michelin person, you're like F banquets all the way, like I'm not interested in that stuff at all and so I remember hating it.
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You know, from an a la carte standpoint, I think that chefs, the ultimate in Michelin style cuisine or like really high-end cuisine, is just doing perfection in the moment and it takes like maybe days you know a lot of cases, days to get everything prepared just right for literally a moment that I'm going to say lasts for 10 seconds or 15 seconds and then begins to diminish.
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So that's why you see these chefs yelling at waiters like get this to the table.
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You want the person who's going to eat it to have it right when it's perfect, and every second that passes it's diminishing in quality and you've worked so hard to get that perfection there right.
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So a la carte is sort of the pinnacle of that and the Michelin stuff I did in France, the three-star, you know.
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It was 40 cooks serving 90 customers per meal.
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So if you think about how much labor goes into creating perfection, like that's really hard.
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So going from that into a buffet, you know I think a lot of chefs perceive buffets as like food trough kind of thing, you know, like a feeding trough, and so when I was in San Francisco, like I didn't do anything creative with bangles, I just helped them out and I got what I wanted.
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I got to work for that chef, but it was the introduction.
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It was that guy who made that deal with me, chef Ryan Sansan, who's a good friend, and we ended up working together in Egypt.
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He ended up over there.
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It was an opening of a property, fairmont Nile City, on the Nile, literally on the Corniche, and I got to be a chef de cuisine of a California cuisine restaurant in there and part of the deal I had with that chef is I'd have to have a buffet and I just like hated it.
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You know, just, oh, you know, this is not what I and he was like.
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You know, matthew, he's a French speaking Swiss guy, actually a great mentor of mine, philippe Bischoff.
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Matthew, you know, your a la carte is very good, but this buffet it looks your standard.
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So I was struggling and the story that I tell it was right before the Arab Spring kicked off.
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We were actually in Syria and we had a friend at the Four Seasons in Damascus, and so Ryan and I were there with our wives, who are both Latinas, and we were in Aleppo, hamahoms, like places that have just been absolutely destroyed since, unfortunately, we were some probably the last tourists in the country.
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Wow, but we got to go to that hotel and I'll never forget like walking in there with the executive chef, who was a friend of his and Western, and we walked into their buffet and it was like there was food there that was beautiful, but what it was was artifacts from, like Syrian history.
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You know, that's this cradle of civilization.
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So these giant like tea urns and everything's like copper and like stone and stuff.
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And I looked at the guy and I'm like they let you put all this stuff like on your buffet.
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And he's like what do you mean?
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This is our culture framing the food.
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And that just completely changed my way of thinking.
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Getting to Hong Kong, which was my first chef job in a club, I thought, oh, how hard can a club be?
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And honestly, I was there for just under six years, three years.
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I just got my ass kicked like daily and it was very humbling because after you do Michelin, after you work in five-star hotels, you think you're good, and that club kicked my ass.
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It was such a big club, two locations, and then really in clubs the point I'm getting to is you have to understand buffet dining.
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In Hong Kong they have a phrase the camera eats first.
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And when I came to understand that it was going to, you know, the Ritz-Carlton or the Mandarin Oriental, there, four Seasons, the food displays were things that people would go take their family photos in front of.
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You know what I mean.
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And so if the camera eats first means beans as a chef, if people don't want to take pictures of your food, even if it tastes really good, you've failed on some level.
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And you know that's we with our eyes like we have things in America that we say too.
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But I brought that mentality after six years there at amazing chief steward who helped me catalog so much cool decor.
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Um, and we had the hair.
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We called it the harry potter closet of decor.
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It's just a giant room.
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We had to get up on ladders to get things down, had gardeners that took care of bonsai plants for me, bamboo all over the place.
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Of course everything grows in hong kong and so the buffets were able to pull off over there.
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I embraced that.
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As a person who always hated it, I was like dude.
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So if we can just do anything we want as a chef to frame our food Like I'm going nuts, and that club had a lot of funds to support us getting decor, and that's what happened.
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After a few years people were taking their family pictures in front of the buffet.
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I was like really I love that, and so that's what I brought to Medina.
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I think most chefs you know in a club environment, like if you're an a la carte only guy and you come in the door with that, you know Gordon Ramsay mentality of like you all suck, that's going to be hard for you, you know you have to be able to feed people in large.
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Like our.
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Easter is 1,200 people, mother's Day is 1,100 people.
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Thanksgiving, we feed 1,700, 1,800 meals.
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Fourth of July, forget about it, right?
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So, yeah, I can do foie gras and truffles and all that stuff.
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A lot of chefs can, but in a club environment a chicken nugget is just important, as important as a piece of foie gras, right?
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Like, being able to talk with children is a great chef skill.
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Um, that you'd think you probably never need.
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But the family aspect of most clubs is just as important as, like, what you think the fine dining aspect of clubs should be.
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So, again, that's why you got to really get to know your environment.
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But you know, back to the point, that he was making hard to find that fit.
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When somebody kicks the door down and thinks they're going to redefine the club based on what they think is cool, as a chef you know, yeah.
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And that episode with Nick started a well, it was a conversation before that he and I had cause I performed at his, his club a few times and we were just chatting.
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We were just like shooting the crap one day and I was like, oh, what's going on?
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He started like telling me about the chef stuff and I I think I understood and knew some maybe I don't want to say issues, but chefs and clubs and trying to find a good one.
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But like when he was telling like, oh my goodness, I didn't even think of and I can't remember if he said it in the episode or off the episode, but it was like, oh, if you can get a chef that could, uh, be presentable and talk to the talk to the members, who can also cook, who is, for the most part, sober.
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And he was like, and I was like, oh my goodness, I even start like like you're right and just taking the ego, putting it down and going like, yes, you can have these ideas and we can try them.
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But really it's about that.
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It was just like eye-opening and from there it's it's just been like now I'm like, oh, like that makes total sense.
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And then now it's just like opened up my eyes to just the appreciation I have for clubs and the food like much, much, much, much more.
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In the beginning you mentioned kind of changing styles a bit from, you know, from the former chef to your chef.
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Was that what the club wanted?
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Is that what you were?
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Is that what you were?
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Is that what you wanted to do?
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Like, what was?
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What was that shift like and why was that shift happening?
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Yeah, no, that's an awesome question.
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I think always as a chef again with your ego in check you have to say things that were done before me that members love and want to keep doing.
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We just have to keep doing them.
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You know like we have to keep that going for them because those are beloved things and there were certainly things that Chef Ponzio was doing that were like that.
00:16:36.044 --> 00:16:39.836
I think, stylistically, I call my style of cooking global eclectic.
00:16:39.836 --> 00:16:54.364
You know, after all this travel and living in different places and just really like admiring all the different chef styles around the world and food styles around the world, you know that's the direction that I, you know I always want to go in, depending on where I'm at.
00:16:54.364 --> 00:17:10.022
But, like I said, you got to, you got to meet the members and really what he said about talking to the membership, I think the chef has to be, you have to develop a rapport with the members and, in my opinion, your first year in any club as a chef, you should spend a lot of time out talking to people and listening to them.
00:17:10.022 --> 00:17:11.285
You know hearing what they want.
00:17:11.285 --> 00:17:30.001
A lot of times, what they want isn't what you want, but that's very important to know, and so I was really thankful, with our 1,100 plus members and then their families and guests, it's a club community of, let's say, 3,500 diners and then, plus they're entertaining if they're doing business or whatever.
00:17:30.001 --> 00:17:34.363
So that's a great size demographic to be able to do different things.
00:17:34.363 --> 00:17:43.236
And what I was hearing from a lot of people were yes, we do want sort of like, not so spicy, like, not non-authentic, but also not like rip your head off.
00:17:43.236 --> 00:17:53.828
You know fish sauce in a Thai curry or you know like a lot of the spice, I think spice we call it Medina, spicy, right, like, so that means two on a scale of 10 is spicy.
00:17:53.828 --> 00:17:55.131
There we go.
00:17:55.131 --> 00:18:11.606
Yeah, you know, it's just one of those things where, again, as a chef, you're like no, it needs to be authentic, and so I'm using habaneros or whatever, and everyone's out there crying and like chugging milk and pounding pieces of bread to try to recover, right, like that's not good and so making that shift.
00:18:11.974 --> 00:18:25.067
And also, I think COVID helped to have a clean break on certain items, because we weren't open for a long time and so the things that we were doing during COVID were things that were like really, in my wheelhouse, I love barbecue, I've done it for decades.
00:18:25.067 --> 00:18:43.646
I bought this giant it's Frontiersman II, yoder Smoker, which is enormous competition grade, you know item and different grills, and so we had a food truck during COVID and then we had that as outdoor restaurants that were centered around that, and those were all just menus that I thought were cool, that members seemed to be digging.
00:18:43.646 --> 00:18:47.345
Sometimes you're a little like two, they call it here, they call it chef.
00:18:47.345 --> 00:18:49.317
You know, you're getting a little cute with the menu.
00:18:49.317 --> 00:18:56.763
There are certain times where that's a cue that it's like a little too pinkies out maybe, and so it's about finding the balance.
00:18:56.884 --> 00:19:03.790
I would also say one of the things I learned in Hong Kong that every chef in a bit larger club you got to figure out is the demographics of the membership right.
00:19:03.790 --> 00:19:13.661
So in Hong Kong what was interesting was we had an entire Chinese kitchen.
00:19:13.661 --> 00:19:20.920
That team was probably 105 cooks and the Chinese kitchen was probably nine, and so the menu there was hilarious because in a lot of cases as the chef I was like guys, you know, like, help me out here.
00:19:20.920 --> 00:19:31.423
A lot of times the food for the Hong Kong Chinese, chinese, chinese was not authentic enough, and then we would go in that direction and then a lot of the membership.
00:19:31.423 --> 00:19:44.808
Even some like what they call ABC American born Chinese were like we want PF Changs, like all this fricking authentic, you know bird's beak claw in the, you know stock stuff.
00:19:44.808 --> 00:19:46.760
We hate that, we want American style Chinese.
00:19:46.760 --> 00:19:48.714
And so like I felt like I couldn't win, almost you know.
00:19:48.714 --> 00:19:56.719
And so you get to a point in clubs of this size, and that was, you know, we had as many memberships there as we have in our entire club community here.
00:19:56.719 --> 00:20:01.903
So, and that was a reciprocal club with lots of other Asian clubs and so just so many people coming and going.
00:20:01.903 --> 00:20:09.704
You know that menu was also big, which is good, cause I could, I could take like half the Chinese section in one direction and half in the more authentic direction.
00:20:09.724 --> 00:20:10.465
So here it's the same.
00:20:10.465 --> 00:20:12.009
Like in our restaurants.
00:20:12.009 --> 00:20:22.818
You know, there's certain stuff that we we feel like we're hitting the pocket for this group, like they just love it and like we're like all right, we finally got it dialed and then within a week I'll have like two people that are like this is too.
00:20:22.818 --> 00:20:24.200
You know, da, da, da, da.
00:20:24.200 --> 00:20:30.226
So I think, as a chef also, you always have to know that you're never going to please 100% of the people.
00:20:30.226 --> 00:20:35.832
You're certainly trying to please the majority plus, but you have to just keep it all moving.
00:20:35.832 --> 00:20:38.625
So I think that's another thing that we did in my time there.
00:20:38.625 --> 00:20:43.045
We change our menus a lot and things that need to stay the same always do.
00:20:43.045 --> 00:20:53.538
There are certain items that will never leave our menus banquets or all the cart restaurants but we change our menus very frequently and that, I think, in this club, is good.
00:20:53.538 --> 00:20:55.022
It keeps people because they eat there a lot.
00:20:55.022 --> 00:21:03.761
You know, in summer it's some members are 10, 12, 15 meals in a week in the club and they don't even look at the menu at that point, like they know the menu by heart.
00:21:04.865 --> 00:21:05.910
So what's your role?
00:21:05.910 --> 00:21:08.156
How do you make the switch from one chef to another?
00:21:08.156 --> 00:21:10.442
Get to know the membership and have a rapport?
00:21:10.442 --> 00:21:17.624
What he said about being able to speak to the members like a lot of chefs are like I'm a kitchen chef, you know, like I stay back here, that's what I do.
00:21:17.624 --> 00:21:22.723
Yeah, if that's all you do, I mean not all right, like you could do that very well and that's good.
00:21:22.723 --> 00:21:28.280
But in a club it requires of you to get to know the membership and then cool things happen, like when the bear came out.
00:21:28.340 --> 00:21:29.221
Have you seen the show the bear?
00:21:29.221 --> 00:21:31.005
Yeah, all right.
00:21:31.005 --> 00:21:35.270
So when that first came out, every member just wanted to talk about it.
00:21:35.270 --> 00:21:41.663
I mean it really captivated, certainly people in the industry, I think thought that show was was like pretty legit and a lot of shows are not right.
00:21:41.663 --> 00:21:44.916
So it was like oh sweet, like it's kind of a true version of us.
00:21:44.916 --> 00:21:47.601
There's dramatization of some stuff, but it's pretty authentic.
00:21:47.601 --> 00:22:02.859
And then also like normal people you know, non-culinary people out there were captivated by it and so our members, I would say, for like a year, most of the conversations that I had at tables or with members at some point would delve into like chef, what do you think about the bear?
00:22:03.059 --> 00:22:03.300
You know.
00:22:03.300 --> 00:22:05.515
And then we talk, we talk, we talk, you know.
00:22:05.515 --> 00:22:06.896
So I love that, you know.
00:22:06.896 --> 00:22:10.663
That's I think, think, and that's how you get to know members is figuring out, just listening to them.
00:22:10.663 --> 00:22:12.405
You know what do they think is cool in the bear?
00:22:12.405 --> 00:22:14.148
It's that in Chicago, so that helps.
00:22:14.148 --> 00:22:15.210
But you know what I mean.
00:22:15.210 --> 00:22:18.201
Like chef tables, episodes, like what are they watching?
00:22:18.201 --> 00:22:19.559
What do they think is cool?
00:22:19.559 --> 00:22:23.798
Build your program around what the members are talking about liking.
00:22:23.798 --> 00:22:25.121
That's kind of my philosophy.
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