Staying true is the discipline of protecting a property's identity while continuing to evolve it, which means declining the investors, trends and guest requests that would make it something it is not, and refusing at the same time to calcify into a museum of its own past. It treats brand as the substance a property repeats daily.
Albert Adrià gave me the whole idea in one sentence, and the two halves of it do different work.
“The key is to stay as pure as possible while trying to evolve.” Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group, Barcelona
Stay pure: refuse the deals and the accommodations that would turn the property into something it is not. Try to evolve: refuse the inverse temptation to freeze. The operators in this book who endured held both at once, every day, for decades. I call the discipline staying true because the word carries both meanings, faithful to what the property is and accurate about what it is becoming. The market makes its ask in many forms, and each one is reasonable on its surface. An investor proposes an expansion that would split the senior team’s attention across two new properties. A guest proposes a change to the menu. Accommodated repeatedly, they drain the property of the distinctiveness that brought the request to its door. Virgilio Martínez of Central in Lima told me he used to care a great deal about critical reviews and now cares much less, because the main person who can criticize him is himself. That reorientation is the precondition for saying no with any consistency.
In a kitchen the discipline looks like Rodolfo Guzmán at Boragó in Santiago, who built his restaurant around indigenous Chilean ingredients when serious Chilean dining was oriented toward Europe, and ran an empty dining room for six years before the identity he had built became the restaurant’s most durable asset. In a hotel it looks like Sjefke Jansen at the Belmond Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg, a property then 141 years old, telling me that what the hotel was really selling was history, and protecting that character against the temptation to internationalize.
Staying true is often confused with refusing to change, and the chefs who practice it are the first to object. Eneko Atxa of Azurmendi opens the restaurant each day feeling naked of prestige, with every accolade from the day before set aside, and runs the kitchen on constant but incremental change. Every dish ends up different from its initial idea, and the identity persists because no single change is large enough to disturb it. Kwong Wai Keung at T’ang Court evolves inside the bounds of Cantonese tradition. Ricardo Costa at The Yeatman lets dishes evolve because the world has evolved. The property that does not evolve calcifies. The property that evolves without protecting its identity becomes something else. What the discipline asks of a leader is an internal compass reliable enough to tell useful pressure from corrosive pressure when the term sheet is already on the table, and the willingness to absorb the disappointments that saying no produces. The cost shows up in deals not done. The return shows up a decade later, in an asset competitors cannot copy at any price.
The idea runs through Chapter 11, Staying True, which closes Part II of the book as the counterweight to Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, and Chapter 10, The Recovery.