When I spoke with Tetsuya Wakuda, he was running Waku Ghin at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.
Wakuda speaks in the book to the question of where a chef’s creativity actually comes from. The answer the interviews gave me, almost without exception, is that it comes from outside the kitchen, and Wakuda put it more directly than most. For him, creativity is rooted in curiosity, and it is already at work at the very beginning of the culinary process, when the sourcing of ingredients starts. When he travels and eats in other people’s restaurants, he pays close attention to the ingredients they use. I took that as research rather than holiday. No particular output is expected from it on the day, and a chef who works this way has learned that the inputs to next year’s menu are gathered this year and the year before, in places that do not look like work. The habit is deliberate. The time away from the range is chosen, and the attention paid in those places is what fills the menu later.
“Creativity is rooted in curiosity. From the very beginning of the culinary process, when we start sourcing ingredients, creativity is a driving force. When I travel and visit restaurants, I pay close attention to the ingredients they use.” Tetsuya Wakuda, Waku Ghin at Marina Bay Sands
In the book, Tetsuya Wakuda appears in Chapter 6, The Creative Act, where his account answers the chapter’s question about where the chefs who create most fluently spend their deliberate time: at markets, in museums, on trains, inside other restaurants, in countries whose cuisines they did not grow up inside. His is one of the clearest statements in the book that curiosity is the raw material and that the chef has to go and collect it. I placed him there because he describes the habit as a routine part of the work rather than as a break from it.