When I spoke with Joachim Wissler, he was chef of Vendôme at Schloss Bensberg in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, a kitchen that has held three Michelin stars across decades. The book notes that he has since become Culinary Director of the Althoff Collection, having stepped back from Vendôme in October 2025.
What Wissler speaks to in the book is the posture of continuous learning at the very top of the field. The most important lesson of his career, he told me, is that a chef’s own opinion of their work is a subjective assessment and is not always correct. The answer is to keep learning and keep experimenting. I found this striking, because it addresses directly the problem most chefs face once they have reached three stars and have every excuse to stop: the temptation to declare the learning finished. Wissler has not. His career has not arrived. It is still arriving, and the daily continuation of the work that brought him to where he is turns out to be the reward.
“The most important lesson I’ve learned over the years is to realize that your own opinion is a subjective assessment of your own work, which is not always correct. You must constantly learn, experiment.” Joachim Wissler, then chef, Vendôme at Schloss Bensberg
There is a second consequence of that posture, and it concerns the people who pass through his kitchen. A chef who teaches cooks a disposition of constant learning, rather than a set of specific dishes, has given them something that outlasts the kitchen itself. The cooks who move on to other kitchens carry the disposition with them. The lineage extends beyond the chef’s own working life, and the legacy compounds.
In the book, Joachim Wissler appears in Chapter 13, The Long Game, where his account of continuous learning names what a long career gives back to the chef who stays in the work, and where his teaching posture is the kitchen side complement to the chapter’s argument about what a leader leaves behind in the people they have trained.