A healthy kitchen culture starts with an explicit ban on shouting and bullying, enforced like a sanitation rule, and is built from the chef's own daily conduct: staying calm under pressure, hiring for personality, sharing knowledge, and managing each cook according to their talents rather than as one undifferentiated brigade.
The professional kitchen has a long reputation for cruelty, and the brigade system that organizes it has, since Escoffier, assumed a strict hierarchy. The chefs I interviewed run kitchens with two and three Michelin stars, and they have kept the hierarchy while discarding the cruelty. What they describe is a culture built the same way every culture in this book is built, through the leader’s own behavior, repeated daily, until the brigade carries a copy of it.
Nicolai Nørregaard of Kadeau in Copenhagen states the foundation as a rule rather than a value.
“There is no shouting or bullying. It is simply not accepted.” Nicolai Nørregaard, Kadeau, Copenhagen
Notice the register. This is a kitchen rule, held on the same plane as a sanitation standard, and the chef enforces it the way he would enforce any other. Nørregaard told me the word underpinning Kadeau’s philosophy is family, and that it is vital the staff love their work. He treats the team’s emotional security as operationally necessary, which is a different claim from treating it as a nicety. Every summer he closes the Copenhagen restaurant and moves the whole staff to a farmhouse on Bornholm, where everyone lives together and works the high season. The bond that forms there is the culture, and it has been earned in that farmhouse as much as on the Copenhagen line.
The second element is the chef’s own temperature. Jonnie Boer, chef and co-owner of De Librije in Zwolle, put applicants through a few days on trial in his kitchen, and what he watched for was passion, perseverance and the right personality rather than experience. He explained how he conducted himself while they were there.
“I believe that people perform better when they are treated well, so I always stay calm, take everything step by step and maintain a birds-eye view.” Jonnie Boer, chef and co-owner, De Librije, Zwolle
A chef who stays calm during service is giving the brigade permission to think. A chef who loses their temper is teaching the line that the correct response to pressure is panic, and the lesson is absorbed by every cook within a week.
The third element is hiring. Matthew Orlando, then chef and owner of Amass in Copenhagen, told me he hires based on personality more than on skill and surrounds himself with people who really care about their work. This is a public commitment by a chef who could afford to be far more demanding on the technical side. The chefs in this book accept, sometimes, that the right commis is two notches below where the kitchen needs them technically and that the chef will carry the gap personally for several months. The technical gap closes. The character gap, had they hired the other way, never would.
The fourth is how the chef manages the people once they are inside. Joan Roca grew El Celler de Can Roca from two cooks to forty, and he told me that managing the team in an inclusive way, based on all their various talents, was the only sustainable path. A chef who treats a forty person brigade as a single unit loses, within a year or two, the cooks who could have become the chef de cuisine of the next decade. Hans Neuner of Ocean in the Algarve, two Michelin stars, gave me four pillars for earning respect in a kitchen: doing what you know well, leading by example, sharing your knowledge with others, and empowering and supporting the team. Read as an operating specification, the third pillar is the one that separates a healthy kitchen from a merely quiet one. The chef actively transfers the techniques and judgments that took years to acquire, instead of hoarding them as the source of authority.
What unites Nørregaard, Boer, Orlando, Roca and Neuner is that none of them described a program or a poster on the wall. They described their own conduct. A healthy kitchen culture is the chef, multiplied.
Chapter 4, First the Team, follows this through hiring for character, onboarding, the leader’s role as protector of the brigade, and the dignified departure.