GUANACASTE, Costa Rica -- Xavier Torres began working as a cook while he was an undergraduate more than a decade ago, but his career has really been cooking since he earned his master's of management in hospitality (MMH) degree from Cornell's School of Hotel Administration last year.

He has been given successive management responsibilities at the Four Seasons luxury resort at Peninsula Papagayo, overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Costa Rica's northwestern Guanacaste province.

Torres, 33, was hired last June as assistant room service manager. He was asked to manage the resort's 120-seat Papagayo restaurant in December, and he was recently promoted to conference services manager, one of two at the hotel. (Torres speaks English, Spanish and Catalan, an asset in dealing with guests and hotel staff. His parents are from Spain and moved to Minnesota before he was born.)

Nightly rates for the hotel's 163 guest rooms start at $395 in the off season and go up to $6,500 for the three-bedroom presidential suite, complete with a private pool and garden. It is one of several stand-alone suites and residences nestled in the hillsides above the hotel entrance.

A guest paying $6,500 a night for a suite inevitably places extra demands on hospitality staff to do more than provide good service, Torres said. "You put yourself in their place -- you see what it must be like to spend $15,000, $20,000, $90,000 on a vacation. If you're spending that kind of money, you'd want everything to be perfect," he said.

The resort's interior designers chose earth tones and indigenous materials, such as stones, rattan, bamboo and wood, to fit the surroundings.

"They go for a natural look, very rustic but at the same time very modern," Torres said. "They found a very nice balance of keeping things tasteful."

The resort's stylized low-rise stucco and wood building exteriors strike the same balance.

"The idea was to make them look like armadillos -- they travel in single file, and one roof's smaller than the next," he said.

Torres' hospitality career began out of economic necessity; he worked in the kitchen of a St. Peter, Minn., tavern to help pay his way while he was an undergraduate studying history and political science at Gustavus Adolphus College.

He eventually went to a culinary school in Barcelona, Spain, then worked as a chef in Mexico for four years. "In 2002-2003, I finished my last year of undergraduate work, then applied at Cornell and got accepted," he said.

He was soon using his culinary skills as a sous-chef at Cornell's Statler Hotel. "They look for that a lot in the MMH program, someone with a lot of practical experience," he said. At the Four Seasons, he supervises the Papagayo restaurant line staff and ensures quality control.

The resort also has three other restaurants, three swimming pools, a full-service spa and fitness center, year-round residential villas, conference facilities, tennis courts, two private beaches, an Arnold Palmer-designed golf course and daily activities, from poker to beach volleyball.

Despite the luxurious tropical setting of his job, there are a few things Torres misses about Cornell and Ithaca -- such as shopping at Wegmans and the pulled-pork wraps served at the Statler's Terrace Restaurant. "I would kill for one of those," he said.

The Four Seasons Costa Rica resort has been featured in such magazines as Travel & Leisure, Town & Country, Su Casa, The Robb Report and People, which covered pop star Pink's Jan. 9 wedding at the resort.

"When I first got here, I was wowed from the first day," Torres said. "We got rated No. 1 in Central and South America by Condé Nast Traveler's readers -- you don't expect an award like that in your second year."

Guanacaste province is the home of Costa Rica's "gold coast," now undergoing a development boom with plans for more high-end resorts, condominiums and ecotourism attractions, such as rainforest canopy tours. The coast also attracts snorkelers, surfers and other adventure travelers.

"There's so much more to do here besides lie on the beach," Torres said. "Before, the economy [in Guanacaste] revolved around rice and cattle, which are not good for forests. But tourism based on preserving the forests, and done conscientiously, can benefit the local economy."