When I spoke with Pedro Subijana, he was the chef of Akelarre in San Sebastián, Spain, with fifty years of cooking behind him.
Subijana speaks to one subject in the book, the long game, and he does so in his own register. I asked many of the people in the book what the decades had given them in return for the hours. Subijana’s answer was a reflection on looking back. He had always been dedicated, curious, humble, responsible, idealistic and patient, he told me, and he became a leader and a businessman without realizing it, because at the beginning he had no choice. He had to take on the responsibility.
“I became a leader and a businessman without even realizing it by the sheer fact that, at the beginning, I had no choice. I had to take on the responsibility.” Pedro Subijana, chef, Akelarre
The compensation Subijana names is the unbidden discovery, late in a career, that the work has shaped the person doing it into someone they would not have predicted at the start. The dedicated young cook becomes, without quite noticing the transition, the elder statesman of his region’s cuisine. The hours and the discipline have produced a person rather than only a body of work. I found that a more honest account of a long career than the versions that describe it as a plan executed.
His reflection also carries into the question of legacy. The chef who, by his fifth decade, has become an institution of his region’s cuisine has done so largely by training the next generation of chefs in that region, many of whom now run their own kitchens and remain in conversation with the original master. The legacy is the chefs the chef trained. It will outlive any specific dish, and in Subijana’s case it has been accumulating for half a century.
“You realize things when you look back on them.” Pedro Subijana, chef, Akelarre
In the book, Pedro Subijana appears in Chapter 13, The Long Game, on becoming a leader without intending to and on the chefs he has trained as the lasting form of his work.