When I spoke with Joan Roca, he was chef of El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain, a restaurant with three Michelin stars that has twice been named number one on the World’s 50 Best list.
What Roca speaks to in the book is the team as the work itself. He grew his kitchen from two cooks at El Celler’s opening in 1986 to forty at the height of its operation, while holding a standard demanding enough to make it twice the most respected restaurant in the world. That growth rests on a conviction I want every aspiring leader to carry: cooking is a team sport, and greatness cannot be achieved alone. Human capital is the most important capital in the restaurant, and El Celler invests heavily in its people. Managing a brigade of that size, he learned, works only when it is done in an inclusive way, based on all the various talents of the people in it.
“You simply cannot achieve greatness alone. Human capital is the most important capital in the restaurant, and we invest heavily in our team and resources to take care of our staff.” Joan Roca, chef, El Celler de Can Roca
He also gave me the gentlest and, I think, the most useful working definition of perfection in the book. A perfect dish, he told me, is a dish cooked and served with love, and he was specific about what that love includes: love for cooking, for the product in your hands, for being a chef, for the natural environment that gives you the ingredients, for the people who will eat the food and for the team you work with. Roca will not catch perfection in the abstract. On his best nights he delivers a series of moments that come close enough that the diner does not notice the difference.
In the book, Joan Roca appears in Chapter 4, First the Team, where his account of El Celler’s growth is the most compressed defense of culture as investment I have heard from any chef; in Chapter 7, In Pursuit of Perfection, where his definition of the perfect dish sits alongside those of his peers; and in Chapter 13, The Long Game, where his integrated life, with the restaurant kitchen under his house, and his decision to build El Celler as a venture of three brothers across generations show how a leader distributes identity so the work can continue.
“A perfect dish is a dish cooked and served with love” Joan Roca, chef, El Celler de Can Roca