When I spoke with David Kinch, he was chef and owner of Manresa in Los Gatos, California, a restaurant he ran for two decades and that held three Michelin stars, on top of more than four decades of cooking. The book records that Manresa closed in December 2022 and that Kinch has since launched a new restaurant group in Los Gatos.
Kinch speaks to the body’s response to the standard, and to what a chef does with authorship once he has stopped needing to own every plate. His acknowledgment of the first is the most candid in the book. The older you get, he told me, the harder it is to embrace the kitchen mentality of working at all costs. Working hard still matters to him. Resting hard matters just as much. The shift he describes is one most senior operators arrive at eventually, often after a correction imposed by the body that they did not see coming. The second subject is how he runs the kitchen. He wants everyone to make a contribution, and he wants his chef de cuisine to put a particular stamp on certain dishes. The chef who can let the next generation of talent contribute distinctively, without treating the contribution as a threat to his own identity, is the chef who has made the shift.
“Yes, it’s important for me to be working hard, but it’s also important for me to be resting hard as well.” David Kinch, then chef and owner, Manresa
In the book, David Kinch appears in Chapter 13, The Long Game, in three places. The first is the chapter’s account of what a long career does to the body, where his candor about rest frames the argument that the chefs and hoteliers who reached their third and fourth decades in good condition are the ones who learned, somewhere in the second, to rest with the same discipline they brought to the work. The second is the chapter’s most concrete illustration of the operating shift, his reliance on his chef de cuisine. The third places that reliance alongside Joan Roca’s decision to run El Celler de Can Roca as a venture of three brothers and Patrizio Cipollini’s long investment in the senior team at Four Seasons Florence, as deliberate ways of distributing a senior person’s identity across other people, so that the property continues when that person eventually steps back.
“I want everyone to make a contribution, and for the chef de cuisine to put their particular stamp on certain dishes.” David Kinch, then chef and owner, Manresa