Ana Roš is chef and owner of Hiša Franko in Kobarid, Slovenia, once named World’s Best Female Chef and one of the most influential chefs working in continental Europe. In our conversation she gave me a single sentence that has stayed with me since I first heard it, and I have put it to work twice in the book: once in the Introduction and again at the opening of the chapter on perfection.
Roš speaks to the pursuit of a standard that cannot be reached. The Introduction pairs her with Aaron Kaupp, a hotelier she has never, to my knowledge, met. Kaupp says that a general manager who picks up an empty coffee cup on the way through the lobby has performed the whole of leadership in a single gesture. Roš gives the chef’s equivalent from the pass. The two sentences are the same observation made from two stations. The hotelier knows the standard is something you chase and never arrive at. The chef knows the dream of perfection is the engine of the work, and that catching it would end the work. Neither was repeating the other. Each was reporting what the craft had taught them.
“You dream about perfection and are always on the hunt,” she told me, “but you curse the day you find it because this is the day you must stop cooking.” Ana Roš, chef and owner, Hiša Franko, Kobarid
That line is the reason the book can claim that the greatest luxury hoteliers and the greatest chefs practice the same craft. It is what the quotations in the book, set next to each other chapter after chapter, are there to show, and Roš supplies the chef’s half of the first and clearest pairing.
In the book, Ana Roš appears in the Introduction, where her hunt for perfection and Kaupp’s coffee cup make the book’s central claim concrete in two sentences, and in Chapter 7, In Pursuit of Perfection, where her sentence opens the chapter and frames its argument about what happens to an operator who stops hunting. The chapter treats her line as the question every serious operator has to answer, and the rest of it is an account of how the people I interviewed go on answering it, service after service, for decades.