When I spoke with Kevin Fehling, he was the chef behind The Table in Hamburg, Germany, a restaurant holding three Michelin stars and run without an investor or a hotel parent behind it. That independence is rare among the chefs in The Luxury of Attention, and it shapes everything he told me about how his kitchen works.
Fehling speaks to two things in the book. The first is empowerment under constraint. Most restaurants at his level survive through an investor or inside a luxury hotel. He has neither, which means he cannot be the bottleneck through which every decision passes, because there is nobody else to absorb the load. His team handles the daily decisions, and he keeps for himself the few that genuinely require the chef’s voice: menu direction, ingredient sourcing, the shape of the guest experience. I came away convinced that many large hotel kitchens could learn from a model that necessity forced into existence. The second is his view of perfection, which he treats as a daily orientation for the working chef rather than a place anyone arrives at.
“Most gourmet restaurants in the high-end segment generally only survive through an investor or are part of a luxury hotel.” Kevin Fehling, chef, The Table, Hamburg
In the book, Kevin Fehling appears in Chapter 5, Giving the Keys, where his kitchen stands beside Mahmoud Skaf’s Ritz-Carlton in Kuala Lumpur as two operations that look nothing alike on the surface and run on the same discipline beneath, and in Chapter 7, In Pursuit of Perfection, where he brings the question of the perfect dish back to the reality of a subjective profession in which every three star cook has a signature of their own. His answer to that question is one of the clearest in the chapter.
“I don’t think chefs can ever achieve perfection, since every three Michelin star cook has his or her own unique, signature style. Our profession is very subjective, so I don’t think there can ever be a perfect dish, and yet we have this desire and passion to constantly seek perfection.” Kevin Fehling, chef, The Table, Hamburg