When I spoke with Martin Berasategui, he was chef and owner of Restaurant Martín Berasategui in Lasarte-Oria, Spain, where he holds three Michelin stars. He has been cooking in the Basque country for almost half a century.
Berasategui speaks in The Luxury of Attention to the question of what sustains a career over that length of time. My chapter on the long game is honest about the cost of the work, and it is equally interested in the compensation. He gave the compensation its widest register. The most important book ever written, he told me, is the book of nature, and it is the chef’s responsibility to read it every morning. What he is describing is a daily renewal of attention to the source: the ingredients, the seasons, the producers and the land that a chef of any region has the privilege of being in continuous relationship with. The work is grounded each morning in whatever the market, the farm and the tide have produced that day. The chef who can still be moved by a perfect peach after more than four decades is the chef whose career is the same career it was in the second year. I also came to see his posture as something that can be passed on. A chef who teaches the team to read the book of nature each morning gives them an orientation to the work that will outlast their time in that kitchen, and the transmission of that orientation, more than any dish, is the legacy.
“The most important book that has ever been written is the book of nature.” Martin Berasategui, chef and owner, Restaurant Martín Berasategui, Lasarte-Oria
In the book, Martin Berasategui appears in Chapter 13, The Long Game, where his morning reading of the book of nature names the renewal that offsets the toll of a long career, and where that same discipline returns later in the chapter as an example of the transmissible posture a chef leaves behind in the people they have trained.