The idea
Perfection in a kitchen or a hotel is a direction, and the best operators have stopped expecting to arrive. They aim well above the published standard every day, they inspect the work themselves before it reaches the guest, and they accept that the pursuit will never close. The skill the chapter teaches is holding that posture without wearing out the people who deliver it.
Ana Roš of Hiša Franko in Slovenia gave me the sentence the chapter is built on. She hunts for perfection and dreads finding it, because that is the day she would have to stop cooking.
“Imperfection is the engine for evolution.” Ana Roš, chef and owner of Hiša Franko, Kobarid
Eric Ripert told me the hunt for one dish, a stuffed calamari, took him twenty years at Le Bernardin. That number is the clearest answer I have to what Roš means. The pursuit is the arc of a career.
Two moments from the chapter show what the posture looks like on an ordinary Tuesday. The first is the audit. Michelin publishes five criteria, and the fifth, consistency over time, is the one that separates the kitchen that catches a star from the kitchen that holds three for decades. Forbes inspectors score hundreds of touchpoints across a stay, and a property that is brilliant at the spa and merely acceptable at the front desk does not get the rating. The leaders I interviewed treat these audits as floors. Their own standard sits above the published criteria, so the inspection confirms what the operation already does. The operator who aims at the audit tends, in time, to miss it, and when the criteria change that operator has to start again.
The second moment is the leader at the threshold. Luc Delafosse, then at Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, walks the floor every day, eats lunch in the employee restaurant, attends the morning lineups and spends two hours each evening in the lobby. The pass and the lobby are where a senior person’s trained eye touches the work last before the guest does, and no checklist can do that inspection for them. Brian Gullbrants described the bar this requires.
“If you ask for excellence, you’ll get a job well done. But if you demand perfection, you’ll achieve excellence.” Brian Gullbrants, then president of Wynn Las Vegas and Encore
The chapter is honest about the cost. Nicholas Yarnell told me stress always accompanies the pursuit and that the skill is in how you respond to it. Jonnie Boer received a bad review the year De Librije earned its first star, lost a week of sleep and came back more determined. Pinar Kartal Timer, who will not call good enough good, said in the same breath that her team needs coaching and time to improve. Hold both of her postures and the operation grows. Hold only the standard and the team burns out inside two years. Hold only the patience and the standard slips.
For an assistant manager, a sous chef or a team lead, the idea asks for four habits. Know the published standard your operation is measured against and set your own section’s bar visibly above it. Be the last set of eyes on your section’s output every shift, at the pass or at the desk. When you correct, correct the work and protect the person, because the pace you are asking for only lasts if the conditions are humane. And once a week, ask yourself which of consistency, creativity and care you invested in and which you postponed, because your own drift shows up there months before the guest notices it.
Think it through
- Which external standard does your operation answer to, and where does your own section’s bar sit relative to it?
- Who was the last person to look at your section’s work before the guest saw it on your most recent shift, and was it you?
- What small lapse have you walked past this month that has quietly become normal?
- Over the last month, which of consistency, creativity or care did you invest in most, and which did you postpone?
This week
Stand at your section’s threshold for five shifts and keep a log of what you caught before it reached the guest.
- Pick the one point where your section’s work leaves your hands and meets the guest: the pass, the front desk, the door of a room after housekeeping, the drinks station.
- For five shifts, spend the busiest twenty minutes standing at that point, look at every item as it crosses, and correct what falls short before it goes.
- Write down each catch in a notebook: what it was, who produced it, and whether a checklist would have caught it.
- At the end of each shift, mark which catches repeated from the day before.
- On the fifth day, read the log, pick the single fault that recurred most, and fix its cause with the person who produced it, in a conversation that names the work and protects the person.
Look for whether the number of catches falls across the week, because if it does not, the standard is still living in your eyes and has not yet moved into the team’s hands.
In the book
Chapter 7 holds the stories the lesson can only point to: Ripert’s twenty years on a single dish and his decision to forget the stars and think only about the work, Boer’s week without sleep after the review, Yarnell on stress and the messy first years of a hotel opening, Joan Roca’s definition of a perfect dish as one cooked and served with love, José Andrés on why two cooks following the same recipe produce two different plates, and Kevin Fehling on why the desire to seek perfection survives the knowledge that it cannot be reached. It also sets out the full argument about audits as floors and the three forces every serious operation has to keep in balance.