As a documented pipeline rather than a wait for inspiration. The chefs I interviewed keep a notebook or a sketchbook, gather ideas over months, develop them away from the dining room and put a creative review on the calendar a few times a year. The structure is what turns a half formed idea into a finished dish.
The part of the creative process that surprises most people who have never worked in a serious kitchen is how little of it is improvised. The chefs I interviewed described something structured, written down and scheduled. Ideas arrive at random. What happens to them afterward is anything but random.
Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group in Barcelona, gave me the cleanest description. A plate is seldom finished in its first phase, when ideas are gathered from many sources. There is a structure underneath the apparent unpredictability, and he reached for an unexpected image to explain it.
“I compare this process to assembling a car. The most important piece is the chassis, and then you assemble the engine, axis, wheels, doors, windows and other parts, but it’s not as systematic a process as it may seem.” Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group, Barcelona
The chassis is fixed. The components have an order in which they must be added. The finished dish is recognizable as something the chef intended even when the assembly contained surprises. Improvisation lives inside the structure.
Nearly every serious creative practice I encountered was organized around a physical artifact. Jonnie Boer, chef and co-owner of De Librije in Zwolle, thought in flavors and textures and carried a small notebook everywhere so the first thought could be captured as a drawing. A few times each year his team sat down together to bring the accumulated ideas to life. Some turned into disasters. Others transformed when a single ingredient was added or taken away. Martha Ortiz, then of Dulce Patria in Mexico City, went further and wrote a libretto for every dish: a short story of emotions and characters in which particular words corresponded to colors and tastes on the plate. From the story came sketches, and from the sketches came a search through markets and antique shops for the objects and flavors that would bring it to life.
“Inspiration strikes at all times so I carry a little notebook with me where I scribble down the first thoughts in a drawing.” Jonnie Boer, chef and co-owner, De Librije, Zwolle
Nobody needs to write librettos. The lesson is that every serious practice has some artifact, whether a notebook, a tasting log or a set of sketches, that lets the chef return to a half formed idea months later without starting over. Hans Neuner of Ocean at Vila Vita Parc in the Algarve showed me what the pipeline produces when it works. On a trip to the north of Portugal he saw pressed pork head meat in a butcher shop, called queijo de porco, pork cheese, though it contains no cheese. The sighting went through research, technique tests and plating iterations and ended as a dish on the menu. A chef who had not taken the trip would never have arrived there.
Hoteliers run the same pipeline with different artifacts. Susanne Hatje, then general manager of Mandarin Oriental, New York, ran the property’s programming as a continuous experiment in collaboration: a photography campaign, a fashion week partnership, a partnership that brought The Aviary and The Office into the hotel. Each was conceived months in advance and refined afterward through guest feedback. A general manager who waits for inspiration will launch nothing distinctive in a year. One running a documented pipeline will launch half a dozen things competitors are still copying a year later.
The cadence is the point. The creative review is an appointment the leader puts on the operation’s calendar six months ahead and refuses to let the daily firefighting displace. Making time for creativity is the wrong frame. The leaders I interviewed had already made it, in ink.
Chapter 6, The Creative Act, sets out the pipeline in full, from where the inputs come from to the team structure that lets a kitchen of ordinary talent out create a kitchen of brilliant cooks with no process at all.