Mostly outside the kitchen. The chefs I interviewed gather their ideas at morning markets, in museums, on trips through regions they did not grow up in, in other people's dining rooms and in books that have nothing to do with cooking. The travel and the reading are research, carried out years before the dish appears.
Ask a chef with three Michelin stars where the next dish will come from and the answer is rarely the kitchen. In my conversations with eighty hoteliers and chefs, the people who create most fluently were the people who spent the most deliberate time away from the range. They were in markets before dawn. They were in museums on a day off. They were on a train in a country whose cuisine they did not grow up inside, eating in someone else’s restaurant and paying close attention to what was on the plate.
Tetsuya Wakuda, who runs Waku Ghin at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, described his travel to me as a working habit rather than a holiday. He watches the ingredients other kitchens use and files them away. There is no specific output expected from any one trip. The inputs to next year’s menu are gathered this year and the year before, in places that do not look like work.
“Creativity is rooted in curiosity. From the very beginning of the culinary process, when we start sourcing ingredients, creativity is a driving force.” Tetsuya Wakuda, chef, Waku Ghin at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
The range of inputs is wider than most leadership writing would think to recommend. Martha Ortiz, then of Dulce Patria in Mexico City, told me she feeds herself on other disciplines in order to ignite the imagination: museums, opera, poetry, the texture of painting techniques. Matthew Orlando, then chef and owner of Amass in Copenhagen, kept a sizeable garden overlooking the harbor and treated it as a living library. When a dish was missing its final component, he walked through the garden and tasted everything until he found it. Enrico Crippa of Piazza Duomo in Alba traced his own habit to childhood summers spent accompanying his grandfather to the market every day to choose simple raw materials. The grandfather’s habit became the chef’s practice.
The morning market deserves its own mention because it came up so often. Borough Market, Toyosu, La Boqueria, Rungis: the walk through a local market has, across many of the chefs in the book, the status of a ritual. It puts the chef in front of the actual product, which the kitchen otherwise sees only after distribution. It surfaces the first chanterelles and the first peaches of the season. And it puts the chef in conversation with the growers and fishmongers whose knowledge of provenance no amount of internet research replaces.
Hoteliers run the same practice under other names. The general managers who design the most distinctive guest experiences are the ones who have been the guest in the most rooms and who walk competing properties on their own time. Alexander van Gastel, then general manager of Pulitzer Amsterdam, built it into onboarding. A concierge takes every new employee on a storytelling tour through the neighborhoods of Amsterdam, ending at the Canal House Museum to learn the history of the canal belt the hotel sits inside.
“This is part of our effort to train and empower all members of our team to become storytellers.” Alexander van Gastel, then general manager of Pulitzer Amsterdam
The quieter input is reading. Not only cookbooks, though those too, but history, fiction, poetry and the scientific writing on flavor and aroma. The chef who reads only inside the field produces work inside the field. The chef who reads outside it is the one whose dishes, eventually, carry the depth that separates a serious creative practice from a derivative one.
Chapter 6, The Creative Act, follows the idea from the market stall through the notebook, the team session, the eighty percent failure rate and the constraints that turn out to be the most productive input of all.