The apprenticeship is the years between recognizing the work and becoming capable of it, spent under a master who gives the apprentice structure, correction and patience. It is the hidden curriculum behind every great career in hospitality and cooking, and at base it is a transmission of attention from a person who has it to a person who needs it.
The idea came from a pattern I could not find an exception to. No one across the eighty interviews taught themselves. Chan Yan Tak, the first Chinese chef to hold three Michelin stars, entered the kitchen at thirteen because his father had died and a cook’s job came with meals and a bed. Ayman Gharib began as a steward in Lebanon, washing dishes and polishing champagne glasses. Krister Svensson, who would later run The St. Regis Bangkok, began the same way in a Stockholm restaurant, and he is clear about what the dishroom taught him.
“I learned early on that starting from the bottom was incredibly important to understanding roles you would otherwise be oblivious to later on.” Krister Svensson, then General Manager, The St. Regis Bangkok
In a hotel the apprenticeship looks like Patu Keswani at the Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi deciding, without telling anyone, to spend his attention on a young Taljinder Singh, pushing him to take on projects beyond his duties until the two of them had written the Taj Group’s first presentation on revenue management. In a kitchen it looks like a cold day in April at El Bulli with no reservations on the books, when the pastry chef asked Ferran Adrià whether there was any point assembling the dessert cart, and Adrià replied that today he would love to see the best one. José Andrés was in that kitchen, took the sentence with him, and it now runs through his restaurants and his field kitchens. The lesson in both cases was the standard when nobody important is watching.
The apprenticeship is often confused with culinary school or hotel school, and the two are different things. The schools create a controlled environment in which a student can find out whether they have the wiring. The apprenticeship is delivered somewhere else entirely, at the pass or in the back office at midnight, by a person several rungs up who has decided to invest in a person several rungs down. It is also confused with the cruelty that historically came with it. The humiliation and the fear were a habit, and the substance was always the willingness of a senior person to tell a junior person the truth about work that was not yet good enough, in a way the junior person could absorb. Eric Ripert inherited the shouting from his own training and repudiated it around the year 2000 because a cook with shaking hands cannot make beautiful food.
What the idea asks of a leader is the hardest of the three gifts, which is patience: withholding promotion until the apprentice is ready, letting them spend the year in butchery or in housekeeping, and subordinating the pleasure of seeing them succeed to a longer view of what the succeeding will require. It also asks something of the apprentice. Receive the correction without defending the work, and bring back a corrected version the next day.
The idea runs through Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, and returns in Chapter 8, The Human Touch, which describes how a standard is carried forward by keeping the next generation close enough to observe it.