When I spoke with Peter Goossens, he was chef and owner of Hof van Cleve in Kruishoutem, Belgium, a three Michelin star kitchen he had run for four decades. The book’s roll call records that Goossens stepped back at the end of 2023 and that Hof van Cleve continues under Floris Van Der Veken.
Goossens speaks to one subject in the book, leading by example, and he gives it a sharper edge than anyone else I interviewed. Where other chefs described motivation or presence, Goossens described a demand. This profession, he told me, requires that you give 300 percent of yourself. The best is never enough. Every day the chef has to be critical in order to perform even better the next day.
“This profession demands that you give 300 percent of yourself. The best is never enough. Every day you need to be critical to perform even better.” Peter Goossens, then chef and owner, Hof van Cleve
What I take from that is a point about where the demand has to land first. The chef must be visibly more demanding of himself than of anyone else on the line, because that is the only stance from which he can credibly demand the same of the brigade. The chef who asks less of himself than he asks of the cooks has, in effect, ceased to lead. The cooks have noticed. In my experience of kitchens at this level, they always notice.
Our conversation was short on the subject and I have let it stay short in the book, because the observation does not need expanding. Four decades behind the pass at the same restaurant is its own argument for the standard Goossens describes. A chef cannot ask a brigade to hold three stars for that long on a demand he does not hold himself to every morning, and the fact that the kitchen continues under a successor suggests the standard was taught as well as kept.
In the book, Peter Goossens appears in Chapter 3, Leading by Example, where his account of a profession that demands 300 percent sits alongside the other chefs and hoteliers who describe the leader setting the standard in person before asking it of the team.