Every master I interviewed is the product of another master. Gilbert Le Coze shaped Eric Ripert, Ferran Adrià shaped José Andrés, Guy Heywood shaped Anneke Brown, John Toner shaped Brian Gullbrants. What these mentors gave was rarely technique. It was attention, and the apprentices still quote them decades later as if it happened yesterday.
Nobody in this book taught themselves. That is the quiet finding behind eighty interviews, and it is the reason this question has such specific answers. The mentors have names, and the people they shaped can describe them in detail forty years later.
On the chef side, the most quoted is Gilbert Le Coze, who founded Le Bernardin with Eric Ripert and died young. Ripert, now in his sixties, still repeats Le Coze’s instruction about reading a good article once and a bad one every day for a long time, a teaching about how a cook relates to his own work rather than a recipe. José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen, apprenticed under Ferran Adrià at El Bulli in the late 1980s and early 1990s and carries a single line from a cold April day when the dining room was empty and the pastry chef saw no reason to build the dessert cart. Ferran wanted to see the best one anyway. Andrés has put that standard into every kitchen and field operation he has run since. Sven Elverfeld, who held three stars at Aqua for a quarter century, credits a young bakery master who told him the confectionery trade was shrinking and pointed him toward a second apprenticeship as a chef.
The hoteliers tell the same story with different names. Taljinder Singh, then general manager of The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, came up under Patu Keswani, then resident manager of The Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi, who pushed him to take on projects beyond his duties and wrote with him the first revenue management presentation in the Taj group. Anneke Brown, then general manager of COMO The Treasury in Perth, came up under Guy Heywood at Amankila in Indonesia.
“He saw the talent within me early on and nurtured it over many years.” Anneke Brown, then general manager of COMO The Treasury, Perth
Brian Gullbrants, then president of Wynn Las Vegas and Encore, tells of John Toner at The Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua in Hawaii, who after a brutal stretch called him into his office, where airline tickets were waiting on the desk: three nights at a nearby resort for Gullbrants, his wife and daughter, plus a bonus check for spending money. Toner told him to go home, pack and disappear. The gesture, in Gullbrants’ telling, was the moment he understood that someone believed in him.
Sometimes the mentorship lasted a single dinner. James Low, then general manager of COMO Uma Paro and COMO Uma Punakha in Bhutan, was a junior employee at a Hyatt property in Asia when Bern Chorengel, then president of Hyatt International, chose to sit beside him at a hosted dinner rather than next to the area vice president and the general manager.
“I’d rather sit next to you because I would like to hear what Hyatt means to you, and how you could add value to our hotel.” Bern Chorengel, as recalled by James Low, then general manager of COMO Uma Paro and COMO Uma Punakha, Bhutan
Low can tell that story as if it happened last week. It is forty years old.
Look across these portraits and the common feature is plain. The mentor rarely gave technique, which can be acquired anywhere, and never gave shortcuts, since the whole point of the apprenticeship is that there are none. What the mentor gave was recognition: the moment a person several rungs up made a person several rungs down feel that the climbing was being witnessed. The economics are lopsided. The mentor received little. The apprentice received the rest of a professional life. That asymmetry is what holds the craft together, and it depends on senior people deciding, at the height of their own careers, to spend attention on people who have not yet earned it.
That attention is scarcer now, with a phone in every senior person’s pocket pulling at them every few minutes. Several of the chefs and hoteliers I interviewed are now doing for the next generation what Le Coze, Heywood, Toner and Chorengel did for them.
Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, tells these mentor stories in full and sets out the three gifts every honored apprenticeship passes on.