Few of the chefs I interviewed chose the kitchen on purpose. They were pulled in by a mother's cooking, a brother who needed hands, a month of winter break, or a job that paid in meals, and then noticed that the repetition did not wear them down the way it wears down most people. That is why they stayed.
The romantic answer is that chefs are born for the stove. The chefs I interviewed told a different story, and most of them began somewhere other than a decision. Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin was fifteen when he was kicked out of school and told to find a vocation. He tried to look sad and was delighted. His mother in Andorra had set the family table every day with linens, china, candles and flowers, and served three courses. He had a taste for fine dining before he knew the phrase, and he figured, with the logic of a teenager, that a kitchen job meant he would get to eat all the time. Culinary school confirmed something that had already happened in his mother’s dining room.
A surprising number arrived by accident. Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group in Barcelona, entered the kitchen at El Bulli at fifteen because his brother Ferran was head chef and needed cooks. He had no interest in cuisine. He worked, ate and slept at the restaurant for two years, moved from station to station, and ended up in the bakery, drawn to the level of knowledge and technique a good baker requires. A family favor turned into the most disciplined work of his life.
“I had no idea what cooking was or what being a cook entailed.” Albert Adrià, then chef of Tickets and the elBarri group, Barcelona
Alex Atala of D.O.M. in São Paulo describes his European training as the result of a traveling circumstance, which is a Brazilian chef’s generous phrase for an accident. He was in and out of kitchens for years for reasons that had little to do with food, and then one day he was not out of them anymore. Aaron Silverman of Pineapple and Pearls and Rose’s Luxury in Washington, DC spent a month of a college winter break at 2941 Restaurant in Falls Church, Virginia, torching tomatoes and picking herbs, and came out so excited that he finished college a year early to enroll in culinary school. A month was enough.
For others the kitchen was an inheritance before it was a choice. Mahmoud Skaf, then general manager of The Ritz-Carlton, Kuala Lumpur, was a certified professional chef by eighteen, and the shape of that work had been set years earlier in his mother’s kitchen.
“My mother’s love for cooking persuaded me to become a chef, and I worked in the kitchen of a small family-run hotel restaurant.” Mahmoud Skaf, then general manager of The Ritz-Carlton, Kuala Lumpur
The late Jonnie Boer of De Librije did not point to a moment at all. He described a disposition, a young Dutch cook who would not compromise on quality in a country where gastronomy barely existed. Sven Elverfeld of Aqua wanted a profession that combined craftsmanship with creativity and found it first as a confectioner, then as a chef. Anthony Bourdain traced his own recognition to a raw oyster on a fisherman’s boat on the Bassin d’Arcachon as a boy, and spent a career chasing that first taste.
What unites these stories is fit rather than fate. Cooking at this level demands a nervous system that can tolerate, and eventually prefer, sustained repetition in pursuit of a mark that is almost impossible to hit. Most people who enter a kitchen leave. The ones who become chefs noticed, early and often without naming it, that the repetition did not grind them down. The chefs in this book will tell you they dream of perfection and never catch it, and that the hunt itself is the pleasure. That wiring is the real answer to the question. The oyster, the brother, the winter break and the mother’s kitchen are just the occasions on which people discovered they had it.
Chapter 1, The Calling, sets these stories side by side with the hoteliers’ and shows why the recognition matters more than the circumstance that produced it.