Like an itinerant specialist, Dan Noonan takes a large machinist's box stuffed with the tools of his trade wherever he goes.
"You never know," he says, "when you'll run into a party of 12."The receptacle is sub-organized with tin and wooden boxes. In them are channel knives, roasting forks, teaspoons, pastry and poultry brushes, corkscrews, apple corers and pliers to pull bones from fish. There are squeeze bottles, a calculator, birthday candles - and vitamins.
"This is the stuff I use every day," he says.
Noonan is sous chef - under chef - at the Rainbow Room, the fine-dining restaurant at Lake Powell's Wahweap Lodge. But, as his tool box suggests, he's always ready to hit the road - or, often in his case, the water - to create a memorable meal for those visiting southern Utah and northern Arizona's lake-and-canyon country.
Noonan has been cooking all his life. He has proof, he says, to back this up.
"My mom has a picture of me at 3, pushing food through a grinder to make spaghetti." When he gets an executive chef's post of his own, "I'm going to put it up and say, `See that little guy? That's me.' "
In part, Noonan became a chef in order to see the world, which, he admits, has been another lifelong pursuit.
He spent two years during the mid-1970s in the Air Force, in basic training and serving a hitch in Germany. He was recruited, in large part, by his uncle, who retired from Hill Air Force Base and with whose family Noonan had come to stay in Utah after graduating from high school in Massachusetts.
"I came out exploring, basically," Noonan says. "I was 18 years old and hadn't seen anything. I got to talking to him and he said, `Dan, if you want to see the world, join the Air Force.' " So Noonan did.
"That's the only time in my life I wasn't cooking," he says.
After the military stint, he apprenticed for nine years in his chosen trade on the Gulf Coast and in Florida during the winters and in Vermont and on Cape Cod during the summers.
"I learned what I could. I worked every position in the kitchen, from the butcher shop to the pastry shop." These years were the equivalent of a culinary education that would have cost something like $60,000, Noonan says. "Instead, I got paid for it."
Eventually, he moved back to Utah, where his mother now also lived. One day, reading the paper, he was intrigued by an ad. It said: "Summer jobs in Alaska for cooks and bartenders."
That's how he met the man who is his mentor today, Roland Schebesta, Wahweap's food and beverage director, who was then executive chef at Denali National Park. Noonan sent a resume and Schebesta called back within days.
Noonan was hired as sous chef at the McKinley Chalet Resort, "which quickly became the finest restaurant in the state of Alaska - no one was doing what we were doing," including catching and serving salmon the same day.
In winter he didn't follow the sun too far south: He headed to Big Sky, Mont., where he worked at a ski resort.
During Noonan's final season in Alaska, Schebesta approached him with a new offer.
" `Hey Dan,' he said, `I have a full-time job for you down at Lake Powell.' I said, `Great! Where's Lake Powell?'
"I'd lived for three years in Utah and had never heard of Lake Powell," Noonan wryly admits.
"This is the first year-round job I've ever held in my life." He was banquet chef then became sous chef at the Rainbow Room, where the staff serves 2,000 meals a day during peak season.
When Noonan gets "out of the office" it's often to prepare and serve meals on houseboats exploring the 186-mile-long lake, most often for corporate clients but sometimes for celebrities. "Usually it's for one meal, but people have hired me for a whole week." Last year he was chef for a party that included Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks. Roland Schebesta, he says, has provided meals for the likes of Michael Douglas and Joe Montana.
Noonan has worked at Lake Powell for five years now, and in his words and in his voice you can hear both a passion for his craft and the possibility, as with the picture painted by his uncle of the Air Force, that perhaps there are new horizons to explore.
"It sounds like a cliche," he says at one point, "but it really is a labor of love - I do it because I enjoy it."
And, Noonan adds, "In my occupation, jobs are simple to find," he says. "You can go anywhere in the world."