You run a Michelin starred restaurant by making consistency the first job of the kitchen, building and protecting a team that can hold the standard without you, keeping the menu moving through a disciplined creative process, and running a business whose margins are tight even at the top. The chefs I interviewed, from Le Bernardin to El Celler de Can Roca, describe the same four jobs, and most of them say the first is the hardest.
Readers ask how to become a chef with Michelin stars far more often than they ask how to run the restaurant once the stars arrive. The second question is the harder one, and the forty three chefs I interviewed for my books answer it in four parts.
Consistency is the job
Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin, with three Michelin stars, gave me the clearest statement of what running a restaurant at that level requires.
“The greatest challenge to success in a restaurant of our caliber is consistency.” Eric Ripert, in A Wealth of Insight (2019)
Every guest at every table, every evening, has to have the best experience the kitchen can produce, and the standard cannot vary with the kind of evening the guest is having or the kind of night the kitchen is having. Enrico Crippa of Piazza Duomo in Alba counts the stakes: with eleven tables serving lunch and dinner, the restaurant is judged twenty two times a day, and each table is a single judge. The pass exists for this reason. The chef stands at the point where the kitchen’s work leaves its hands, and nothing crosses it that falls short.
The team holds the standard
A chef cannot inspect every plate forever. The restaurant that lasts is the one whose team holds the standard when the chef is not looking, which is why the chefs in the book talk about people before they talk about food. Joan Roca of El Celler de Can Roca started in a kitchen of two in 1986 and now leads forty cooks.
“Human capital is the most important capital in the restaurant, and we invest heavily in our team and resources to take care of our staff.” Joan Roca, chef, El Celler de Can Roca, Girona
Roca’s restaurant gives up Tuesday lunch service, and the revenue that comes with it, to keep that time for the team. Ripert describes a kitchen in which nobody yells, because a cook cannot make delicious and beautiful food if his hands are shaking from fear. Martin Berasategui writes everything down in an endless number of notebooks so that his team knows exactly what he wants to make. The common thread is a chef who treats the brigade’s formation as the main work and the plate as the result of it.
The menu keeps moving
Stars are given for what the restaurant is, and kept by what it becomes. The chefs describe a creative process that is far more disciplined than the word suggests: a pool of ideas, low pressure testing, feedback from the dining room, and a willingness to drop a dish with a clear reason. Joachim Wissler at Vendôme runs a creative pool of three people who decide what goes on the menu and holds a feedback session with the front of house once it does. Matthew Orlando at Amass never repeats a dish once it comes off the menu. Ripert’s rule closes the loop: once the team is content with a dish and it goes on the menu, the next goal is to consistently produce that dish. The chapter on the creative act in The Luxury of Attention sets the process out in full.
It is a business, with thin margins
The part of the job the public never sees is the one the chefs are most candid about in private. Orlando, who owns Amass as well as cooking in it, said it directly.
“Profit margins at this level of restaurant are tight, and we must wear many different hats.” Matthew Orlando, in A Wealth of Insight (2019)
A restaurant at this level carries the cost of extraordinary raw materials, a large brigade, long development time for each dish and the pressure of accolades that, as Crippa puts it, are the bread and butter of the work. The chefs who run such restaurants well are the ones who have built a strong creative team around them, as Orlando says, so that the owner’s lack of mental space does not stop the kitchen from pushing forward, and who treat the numbers as part of the craft rather than an interruption to it.
Run those four jobs well, in that order, and the stars take care of themselves. Ripert told me he does not think about maintaining the awards on his way to work in the morning; he thinks about what he needs to do as a chef, and believes the awards follow from the work. The question on how chefs handle the pressure of perfection, and the collection of the forty three chefs in the book, carry the rest of the answer.