It asks for close, unwavering attention to another person's experience, held for years at a time under pressure and fatigue. Chefs describe the same demand as repetition in pursuit of a standard they never quite reach. The people who stay say the work costs them less than it costs everyone around them.
Strip away the romance and the work at the top of this industry comes down to one demand. A hotelier at a serious level has to pay close, unwavering attention to the experience of another human being, and keep paying it for years, for decades, under pressure, through fatigue, across a dozen time zones. There is no point at which the attention is allowed to lapse. The craft runs on a particular kind of nervous system, and the people who rise in it tend to discover early that they have it. The attention is, for them, effortless. They do not run out.
George Cozonis grew up inside that demand before he had a name for it. His parents ran a restaurant in Chicago and he spent his childhood playing in the storeroom among the delivery boxes. At seven his father paid him a dollar a cottage cheese container to pick up trash in the parking lot. From there he moved to dishwashing, then food prep, then the dining room, then the line. By the time he arrived at The Ritz-Carlton, Phoenix, and absorbed the idea that the staff were ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen, he had been inside the work since before he could read.
“It didn’t seem like they had jobs as much as they were always taking care of the restaurant, its guests and our employees as though they were extended family.” George Cozonis, then general manager of The Plaza Hotel, New York
That line describes the texture of the work at the highest level better than any job description. It is a way of life more than a shift. The guest, the building and the people who work in it are all under your care at once, and the care does not clock out.
The kitchen version of the same demand is repetition. Cooking at the level this book describes requires a nervous system that can tolerate, and eventually prefer, doing the same thing over and over in pursuit of a mark that is almost impossible to hit. The chefs I interviewed will tell you they dream of perfection and never catch it, and that the hunt itself is the pleasure. The stagiaire years are built around this. A young cook is placed in an established kitchen and given, for a long time, very little to do: the same cut, the same herb, the same fish, day after day. The attrition is brutal by design. The kitchen is sorting for the wiring, and the people who remain after six months of picking herbs are the people who were always going to stay.
The late Jonnie Boer came up in a Dutch kitchen at a time when gastronomy in the Netherlands barely existed and everything was measured against French cuisine. A young cook who wanted to build a national cuisine around Dutch ingredients was facing a long road. He described his early years as heavy but exciting, and he described himself less by a moment of revelation than by a disposition he brought into the room.
“I never compromised on quality.” Jonnie Boer, chef and co-owner of De Librije, Zwolle
What unites the hotel floor and the kitchen is that both are places where the demand never eases and most people leave. The ones who stay are describing, without quite knowing it, a match between their own temperament and the craft. Anthony Bourdain put the unromantic version on the record when we spoke in January 2016: the profession has always accepted every kind of person, and only a few of them will flourish in it. The people who flourish are the ones for whom the work does not grind them down the way it grinds most of us down.
Chapter 1, The Calling, describes how these people came to recognize that match in themselves, and the chapters that follow take up what the work asks once the door has closed behind them.