By Mary Thayer Haugen
Wayne Knowles
Executive Chef Oak Crest,
Parkville, Maryland
Wayne Knowles seems to have inherited his family’s gift for cooking. “My mother and my grandmothers were fabulous cooks,” he says.
“I guess that’s part of the reason I started cooking at a young age. I liked playing around in the kitchen so my Mom taught me to cook and let me help her.
“By high school, I was really into sports. But when I’d come home complaining of hunger, my Mom would tell me to cook something for myself. It would look so good, she’d say, ‘Why don’t you just cook something for all of us.’ And I would,” Wayne explains.
After high school, he went into the Coast Guard. When they figured out he was a good cook, he was assigned to cooking duty. Eventually, they asked him to go to the Coast Guard School of Cooking and Baking.
“I didn’t want to go, because I loved being on the ship. I had a lot of fun traveling and I can’t think of a better place to be than on the water. But I did go and it was a pretty good school,” he says.
After four years in the Coast Guard and a stint as a hotel cook, he decided to get more formal training. That is how Wayne came to be a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park in New York.
From there he went to work for Hyatt and earned the privilege of opening hotels. Among the many hotels he helped to open were the Baltimore Hyatt Regency and the Grand Cypress in Florida.
He’s also worked for the Disney Company and had his own restaurant. He intersected with Erickson after he and his wife moved to Baltimore, Maryland.