When I spoke with Niki Nakayama, she was the chef of n/naka in Los Angeles, a Michelin-starred restaurant offering a California exploration of the art of kaiseki.
Nakayama speaks to two subjects in the book. The first is how a chef keeps a team motivated and aligned. Her answer was about the people she chooses to work with and the shared understanding she builds among them. She told me she is a firm believer in surrounding herself with people who share the vision, because everyone has to be on the same page about what the kitchen is trying to achieve and why it is doing the work it is doing. In my own account of her kitchen, that shared understanding does not arrive by memo. It arrives through repeated, observed gesture: the chef who tastes every dish before it leaves the pass, who fixes the mise, who stays after service to debrief a single failure.
“One of the most important ways to maintain enthusiasm and motivation on the team is to ensure we all share the same understanding of why we are doing the work we are doing.” Niki Nakayama, chef, n/naka
The second subject is the reading of the individual guest. n/naka seats roughly twenty six guests across two seatings, and the kaiseki tradition Nakayama works in is built around the chef’s reading of each diner’s needs across a multi course progression. The diner who lingers over the third course will find the fourth slightly delayed. The diner who is moving briskly will find the next course arriving sooner. The guests do not see the calibration. The chef and the brigade are doing it constantly, on the conviction that the meal is being eaten by individuals rather than by covers. I came away from our conversation thinking that much of what Western fine dining now describes as personalization is an inheritance from kitchens like hers, where the principle has been present from the beginning.
In the book, Niki Nakayama appears in Chapter 3, Leading by Example, on choosing like minded people and keeping the team’s understanding of the work shared; in Chapter 8, The Human Touch, on pacing the meal to each diner at an intimate scale; and in Chapter 9, Knowing Your Guest, where that per diner pacing is placed alongside the hoteliers’ practices of anticipation.
“I’m a firm believer in the power of surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals because I’ve realized that we must all be on the same page with respect to our vision and what we want to achieve.” Niki Nakayama, chef, n/naka