When I spoke with Hans Neuner, he was chef of Ocean restaurant at Vila Vita Parc in the Algarve, Portugal, a kitchen holding two Michelin stars.
What Neuner speaks to in the book is culture as a daily practice rather than a slogan. He gave me a formulation in four pillars for how a leader earns respect among a team, among colleagues and beyond. I read it as an operational specification. Doing what you know well means the leader does not bluff into the parts of the operation they do not understand. Leading by example means doing the work the leader asks of the team. Sharing knowledge means actively transferring the techniques and judgments that took years to acquire. Empowering and supporting means creating the room in which the team can act without permission. A leader doing all four every day has the kind of culture no off site can manufacture.
“Earning respect in this world, among your team, colleagues and beyond, comes from several pillars: doing what you know well, leading by example, sharing your knowledge and expertise with others, and by empowering and supporting your team members.” Hans Neuner, chef, Ocean restaurant at Vila Vita Parc
He also gave me one of the most concrete examples in the book of where a dish comes from. On a trip to the north of Portugal he saw, for the first time, a piece of pressed pork head meat in a butcher shop. It was called queijo de porco, pork cheese, though it contains no cheese. The trip was the input. The product was the trigger. The standard development process of research, technique testing and plating iterations did the rest, and the dish ended up on the Ocean menu. The chef who is not on the trip in the first place never arrives at the dish.
In the book, Hans Neuner appears in Chapter 4, First the Team, where his four pillars describe how a leader builds a culture by what they do each day, and in Chapter 6, The Creative Act, where the queijo de porco story shows what the creative pipeline produces when a chef pays close attention outside his own region.
“On a trip to the north of Portugal, I saw for the first time a piece of pressed pork head meat in a butcher shop. It was called queijo de porco, which means pork cheese, even though it doesn’t have any cheese in it.” Hans Neuner, chef, Ocean restaurant at Vila Vita Parc