A fifteen to twenty year apprenticeship, a willingness to take on responsibility before you feel ready, the humility to keep learning after the awards arrive, and the discipline to build people who will carry the standard without you. The leaders I interviewed describe arriving at the top almost without noticing.
The people at the top of this industry did not, for the most part, set out to get there. That is the first surprise in the interviews, and it is worth sitting with before any list of attributes. Pedro Subijana of Akelarre in San Sebastián has cooked for fifty years and holds three Michelin stars. Asked how he came to lead, he described something closer to an accident of circumstance than a plan.
“I became a leader and a businessman without even realizing it by the sheer fact that, at the beginning, I had no choice. I had to take on the responsibility.” Pedro Subijana, chef, Akelarre, San Sebastián
He also described the qualities he found in himself looking back: dedicated, curious, humble, responsible, idealistic and patient. None of these is a credential. All of them are dispositions, and the common thread across my conversations is that the top of the field is reached by people who took on responsibility when it was handed to them and then held it with those dispositions for a very long time.
The second element is the length of the arc, and it should not be understated. The formation of mastery in either field runs fifteen to twenty years. Cristina Bowerman, chef of Glass Hostaria in Rome, came to the kitchen at thirty two after a law degree, foreign languages and a decade as a graphic designer, gave herself ten years to succeed, learned fresh pasta for six months in a professional kitchen and ended at a Michelin star. She also paid a price her male peers did not.
“Others did not realize I was willing to study and work 20 hours a day to become a good cook first and a good chef second.” Cristina Bowerman, chef, Glass Hostaria, Rome
The sequence in that sentence matters: a good cook first, a good chef second. Nobody I interviewed skipped the first part, and the ones who tried to shorten it are not in the book. Bowerman’s earlier life was not wasted time either. Her law studies, her languages and her design career all sped up the learning curve once she was inside the kitchen.
The third element is what happens after the awards. Joachim Wissler, then chef of Vendôme at Schloss Bensberg in Bergisch Gladbach, with three Michelin stars across decades, still regarded his own judgment of his work as a subjective assessment that might be wrong, and insisted on constant learning and experiment. The people who stay at the top are the ones who never declared the learning finished. Martin Berasategui, almost half a century into cooking in the Basque country, framed the same posture as a daily responsibility to read the book of nature every morning.
The fourth element is the one most under prepared for. Reaching the top in any durable sense means building people who carry the standard themselves. David Kinch at Manresa relied on his chef de cuisine and wanted the team’s own stamp on the dishes. Joan Roca built El Celler de Can Roca as a venture of three brothers across generations. Patrizio Cipollini spent years assembling the senior bench at Four Seasons Hotel Firenze. Each is a deliberate distribution of the senior person’s identity across several people, so that the property keeps its identity when the senior person steps back.
That points to the final thing. The temptation at the top is to build something distinctive enough to be remembered: a signature style, a personal brand. What the leaders I interviewed actually pass on is a lineage. Guy Savoy told me the rules underpinning the culinary arts are the foundations without which creativity cannot flourish, and that those rules will live on. The signature can be forgotten. The lineage runs through the people you trained, into careers and properties you will never see.
Chapter 13, The Long Game, follows this arc from the first day of the apprenticeship through succession and legacy, in the words of the people who completed it.