Either can work, and several of the chefs I interviewed did both. What none of them skipped was the apprenticeship: years in a working kitchen under a master who corrected them. School can confirm a calling and teach technique. It cannot deliver the curriculum that is only taught at the pass.
The chefs I interviewed came up by every route. Some went to culinary school. Some walked into a kitchen at fifteen and never left. Several did both. The pattern that holds across all of them has nothing to do with which door they used. Nobody in this book taught themselves. Every master is the product of another master, and that transmission happened in a kitchen, not a classroom.
Sven Elverfeld’s route is the one I find most instructive, because it was an apprenticeship in the strict old sense. As a teenager in the early 1980s he was the only apprentice a small German bakery would take that year, and he spent three years alone with a master learning to be a confectioner.
“My superior was quite young himself and he really encouraged me onward.” Sven Elverfeld, Aqua at The Ritz-Carlton, Wolfsburg
That master could see what the boy could not: the confectionery trade was contracting, and the kind thing was to point him somewhere wider. Elverfeld listened and began a second apprenticeship as a chef. He went on to hold three Michelin stars at Aqua for a quarter century. The lesson was never the piping technique. It was a person several rungs up deciding to spend attention on a person several rungs down. No school can schedule that.
The hoteliers make the same point from the other side of the service door. Ayman Gharib, then general manager of Raffles Dubai and Sofitel Dubai Wafi, started as a steward in a luxury restaurant chain in Lebanon, washing dishes, peeling onions and polishing champagne glasses.
“You need to understand the basics of the business to be successful.” Ayman Gharib, then general manager of Raffles Dubai and Sofitel Dubai Wafi
A skeptic might ask what dishwashing teaches that a semester could not. The honest answer is that it teaches nothing technical. A person can learn to wash a dish in an hour. What takes a year is the orientation of someone who has done it for a year: the patience of repetition, the eye that comes from daily contact with what a kitchen produces and throws away, and the humility of having stood at the bottom of a hierarchy long enough never to look down on the people standing there later. Krister Svensson, then general manager of The St. Regis Bangkok, began as a steward in Stockholm and says it taught him to value every job, however small. That is the curriculum the dishroom delivers and the school cannot.
School still has a place. For some it was the formal confirmation of a calling that had already happened. Aaron Silverman of Pineapple and Pearls and Rose’s Luxury finished college a year early to enroll in culinary school after a single month in a restaurant kitchen. School gave him vocabulary and technique. His first real kitchen, the one he still calls the toughest he has worked in, gave him the rest. School is good at teaching what can be taught in a controlled environment. The apprenticeship delivers the things that are only learned by being corrected, by being sent to the wrong section, and by waiting for a promotion a patient chef declines to give until you are ready.
The chapter’s warning is for the person who treats school, or any credential, as a substitute. The celebrity chef short course promising a sous chef job in eighteen months produces a cook who has never received hard correction, and the first one that lands in a professional life registers as a wound rather than information. The chefs I spoke with were unanimous on the remedy. Go to school if it helps you. Then find a master, submit to the sections you did not choose, and stay long enough for the work to become part of who you are.
Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, follows Elverfeld, Chan Yan Tak, Eric Ripert and José Andrés through those years and explains why the schools cannot deliver what the kitchen does.