Love the work enough to survive its first decade, learn to rest before your body forces you to, never declare your learning finished, and start building the people who will carry the standard after you from the first day rather than the last. The operators I interviewed who lasted forty years did all four.
A long career in this industry has its own physics. The people who reach the fourth decade intact did specific things along the way that the early career operator cannot easily see, and the point of my conversations with chefs in their fifth decade behind the pass and general managers on their sixth flag was to find out what those things were.
The first is the least negotiable. Mariano Silvestri, then general manager of Park Hyatt Maldives Hadahaa, put it in terms that leave no room for a career chosen for the glamour.
“The only way you will survive in this business is if you truly love your job.” Mariano Silvestri, then general manager of Park Hyatt Maldives Hadahaa
He went on to describe why: sleepless nights, unsociable hours, rushed meals, endless hours on your feet, a lifestyle that will not love you back. Passion is the fuel. In the early years, when nothing you produce yet meets the standard, it is the only thing that gets you back to the lobby or the kitchen the morning after a bad service. Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group in Barcelona, paired passion with humbleness as the two most important things, and the pairing is deliberate. Passion brings you in. Humbleness, the daily acknowledgment that the work is larger than you and the standard higher than you have yet reached, is what keeps you in once the early passion would have burnt itself out.
The second is rest, and it has a timetable. David Kinch, then chef and owner of Manresa in Los Gatos, California, told me that resting hard had become as important to him as working hard, and that the kitchen’s creed of work at all costs gets harder to embrace with age. Across my interviews, the operators who reached their third and fourth decades in the trade in good condition were the ones who, in their second decade, learned to rest with the same discipline they brought to the work. The ones who did not are not in this book.
The third is to keep learning past the point where the industry has told you that you have arrived. Joachim Wissler, then chef of Vendôme at Schloss Bensberg in Bergisch Gladbach, held three Michelin stars across decades and still described his own opinion of his work as suspect.
“The most important lesson I’ve learned over the years is to realize that your own opinion is a subjective assessment of your own work, which is not always correct. You must constantly learn, experiment.” Joachim Wissler, then chef of Vendôme at Schloss Bensberg, Bergisch Gladbach
Wissler solved the problem most people face at the top of a field, which is the temptation to declare the learning finished. His career had not arrived. It was still arriving, and that posture is what makes a fourth decade possible.
The fourth is succession, and it should begin far earlier than most people start it. The second hardest thing in this industry, after an original opening, is handing it on. Kinch relied on his chef de cuisine and wanted the team to put their own stamp on dishes. Joan Roca built El Celler de Can Roca as a three brother, multigenerational venture. Patrizio Cipollini spent years building the senior bench at Four Seasons Hotel Firenze, so that the property’s continuity did not depend on his daily presence. Twenty years of distributing the standard produces a property whose identity is institutional. Five years produces a moment the operator would rather not think about.
There is a financial condition underneath all four. A fifteen to twenty year apprenticeship is only sustainable if the wages along it can sustain a life, and the operators who have begun to address that honestly are keeping the people they spent years forming.
Chapter 13, The Long Game, follows these disciplines through the full arc of a career, from what the work costs to what it hands on.