Good cooks stay in kitchens where they are treated well, managed as individuals rather than as an undifferentiated brigade, and shielded from shouting and bullying. The chefs I interviewed describe calm leadership, explicit prohibitions on abuse, and investment in each cook's particular talents as the only sustainable way to hold a team together.
Cooks leave kitchens for reasons that have very little to do with pay and a great deal to do with how they are treated on a Tuesday night in the middle of a hard service. The chefs in this book, who run some of the most demanding kitchens in the world, were remarkably consistent on this point. The brigade stays when the chef is calm, when abuse is off the table, and when each cook is seen as a specific person with a specific set of talents worth developing.
Jonnie Boer, chef and co-owner of De Librije in Zwolle, described how he evaluated people who came to his kitchen on trial. Experience mattered less to him than passion, perseverance and the right personality. What struck me more was what he said about his own conduct once they were in the door.
“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
That sentence carries a theory of retention inside it. A chef who stays calm under pressure gives the brigade permission to work rather than brace. A chef who takes everything step by step makes the standard teachable instead of mysterious. A chef with a view of the whole kitchen notices the cook who is drowning before the cook has to announce it. Cooks who are treated that way do not spend their shifts quietly planning an exit.
Nicolai Nørregaard of Kadeau in Copenhagen goes further and makes the prohibition explicit. There is no shouting or bullying in his kitchen. He treats that as a kitchen rule, on the same plane as a sanitation standard, rather than as a value statement on a wall. He frames the emotional security of the staff as operationally necessary. Every summer he closes Kadeau Copenhagen and moves the entire team to Bornholm island for the high season, where everyone lives together in a farmhouse. The bond that comes out of three months of shared work and shared meals is the kind no team building exercise can produce, and it is a large part of why his cooks come back.
The third element is the one most chefs underestimate. Joan Roca grew El Celler de Can Roca from two cooks in 1986 to forty at the height of its operation. He told me the lesson of that growth in a single line.
“I learned that managing such a team in an inclusive way based on all their various talents is the only sustainable path.” Joan Roca, chef, El Celler de Can Roca, Girona
The chef who manages a forty person brigade as one undifferentiated unit will lose, within a year or two, the very people who could have become the chef de cuisine of the next decade. The chef who manages each cook according to who they actually are keeps them, develops them, and finds that the kitchen improves year on year at a rate the other approach cannot match.
There is one more practice worth naming, because it sits upstream of all of this. Several of the chefs hire for personality over skill, and accept that the character superior commis may be two notches below where the kitchen needs them technically. The chef carries that gap personally for a few months. In their experience it almost always pays, because the technical gap closes and the character gap never would have. A cook hired for who they are, and then treated well, has very little reason to go.
Chapter 4, First the Team, follows this through hiring, onboarding, culture and the moment a leader has to let someone go, with accounts from both kitchens and hotels.