Somewhere in the second or third decade, the work stops being ambition and becomes purpose. The people I interviewed who have stayed forty and fifty years are sustained by the team they built, the craft they are still learning, and the daily renewal of attention to ingredients, guests and the people coming up behind them.
The stamina of the people in this book is easy to mistake for luck or constitution. It is neither. Over years of doing the work, they discovered what it returns to a person who gives it their working life, and the discovery is what holds them. When I asked the longest serving chefs and hoteliers what they value most, the answers came with more genuine warmth and less rehearsed language than any other subject in the interviews.
The first thing they named was the team. Guy Savoy of Restaurant Guy Savoy in Paris borrowed his frame from his other lifelong love, rugby, where he learned that the winning side is the one that best combines contrasting talents into a single unit.
“Today, I view my role as being similar to that of both a rugby captain and coach: my job is to put the right people in the right positions, and to encourage them to play their best.” Guy Savoy, chef, Restaurant Guy Savoy, Paris
By the end of a long career, the pleasure of having built the brigade is larger than the pleasure of any single dish. Dishes pass. The collective capacity of a team, built over decades, is what the chef carries to the end. The same is true on the hotel side. Tom Roelens, then general manager of Four Seasons Resort Lanaʻi, told me simply that luxury hospitality is a people business, and the longest serving general managers describe their teams, their regular guests and their longstanding suppliers as the substance of the work rather than the means to an end.
The second thing was the shift that nobody announces. At some point, the operator notices they have stopped chasing the next star, the next opening, the next press cycle. They are doing the work because the work is what they are now for: the team depends on them, the craft is what they want to keep contributing to, and the next generation needs someone who has done it for a long time. Ambition was always partly external, measured in recognition and comparison with peers, and it runs out. Purpose is internal, and it does not. David Kinch’s reliance on his chef de cuisine at Manresa, and his wish for everyone in the kitchen to put their own stamp on certain dishes, is the shift in operation. The chef who no longer needs to own every plate has made room for the kitchen to share authorship, and the kitchen becomes more distinctive for it.
The third thing was the learning, which the best of them refuse to call finished. Joachim Wissler, then chef of Vendôme at Schloss Bensberg, at three Michelin stars, still treated his own opinion of his work as a subjective assessment that might be wrong. Martin Berasategui, cooking in the Basque country for almost half a century, described the book of nature as the most important ever written and his responsibility to read it every morning. The chef who can still be moved by a perfect peach in the forty fourth year has the same career he had in the second.
Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group in Barcelona, compressed the whole mechanism into a single sentence.
“Passion and humbleness are the most important things.” Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group, Barcelona
Passion brings a person in and carries them through the years when nothing they make yet meets the standard. Humbleness keeps them there after passion alone would have burnt out, because it treats every service as a fresh chance to do the work the last one did not quite do. Decades of pointing one’s attention at other human beings produces a person whose attention has become the asset itself, and the world the next decade is producing makes that kind of person more valuable, not less.
Chapter 13, The Long Game, sets the compensations of the work against its costs and follows the shift from ambition to purpose into succession and lineage.