The idea
The people who last in hospitality and in serious kitchens did not choose the work the way the outside world imagines. They were already inside a task, often a menial one, when they noticed that the attention it demanded came easily to them and did not run out. That noticing is the calling. It is a recognition of fit, made in the present tense, and it is a far more reliable guide to a career than any sense of destiny.
Aaron Kaupp was about twenty, serving breakfast at the Golden Tulip Hotel, when he lifted a fresh pot of coffee before a guest had looked up from a cup running low. He knew that a busy dining room suited him.
“My first job in the industry was serving breakfast at the Golden Tulip Hotel, and I knew right then that I wanted this to be my career.” Aaron Kaupp, then general manager of Le Royal Monceau, Raffles Paris
James Low had not served a single breakfast when his moment came. He was a schoolboy on a field trip to a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, with a career in banking in mind, and he walked into the lobby and recognized the room he wanted to spend his working life in.
“I quietly told myself that this is the environment I want to be in.” James Low, then general manager of COMO Uma Paro and COMO Uma Punakha, Bhutan
The two stories differ in every surface detail and agree on the mechanism. Each man paid attention to his own experience of a place and trusted what he found there. The chapter also holds the harder cases, Albert Adrià and Alex Atala among them, who resisted the work for years and were pulled in anyway. In those cases the calling arrived as a persistence, and the work kept its hold on a person who had declared himself finished with it.
What the calling is answering is a question of fit. Hospitality at a serious level asks a person to pay close attention to another human being for years, under pressure and through fatigue. Cooking at the level the book describes asks for sustained repetition in pursuit of a mark that is almost never hit. Both require a particular wiring. The people who have it find out early, because the attention does not tire them. Those who lack it do the same hours and experience them as tedium. The sorting happens on its own, in the first year on a front desk or the first six months of picking herbs.
This matters to a leader at any level because it changes what you are looking for. The signal that counts is the one Kaupp gave at the breakfast sideboard: a person noticing a need before it is spoken, and finding the noticing effortless. A supervisor, a sous chef or a team lead sees that signal every shift if they are watching for it. The institutions that recruit well give young people honest exposure to the real work, without dressing it up and without protecting them from it, and then they trust what the person says afterward.
It also matters for your own next step. If you are working toward a larger role, the question to answer is whether the attention that role demands is something you already give without strain. The people in the book did not force the fit. They noticed it in a task they were already doing, and they built the next forty years on what they had noticed.
Think it through
- Which task in your week do you find yourself still thinking about after the shift ends, and which one do you simply get through?
- Who on your team noticed a guest’s or a colleague’s need this week before anyone asked, and what were they doing at the time?
- When a new person joins your team, how much of the real work do they see in the first month, and how much is dressed up or kept from them?
- If you are working toward a bigger role, which parts of it already come to you without strain, and which parts would you be performing?
This week
Keep a fit log for five shifts: a single page that records, for yourself and for two junior people on your team, the moments when attention came easily and the moments when it ran out.
- Choose two people who have been on the team for less than a year and tell no one what you are watching for.
- At the end of each shift, write one line for each of them and one for yourself: the moment in the shift when the person was most absorbed in a guest, a dish or a colleague, and the moment when they were plainly running on duty alone.
- Record what each person was doing at the absorbed moment. Note the task rather than the mood.
- On the fifth day, ask each of the two what part of the week they thought about after they went home, and write the answer beside your own observation.
- Read the page in one sitting and mark where your observation and their answer match.
Look for the task that keeps appearing in the absorbed column for each person, because that is where their fit lives, and it is rarely the task their job title names.
In the book
Chapter 1, The Calling, holds the stories this lesson can only point at: Eric Ripert delighted at being expelled from school at fifteen, Damien Bastiat behind the bar at the Savoy watching Willy Bauer walk the floor, George Cozonis playing among the delivery boxes of his parents’ restaurant in Chicago, and Anthony Bourdain’s unromantic account of who flourishes in this profession. It also makes the full argument about why the best schools and the stagiaire years work as selection rather than persuasion, and it closes with a note on what the calling is not.