The chefs: 43 Michelin-starred chefs on leadership and the craft

The chefs in the book hold, between them, most of the Michelin stars a reader could name: Eric Ripert at Le Bernardin, Joan Roca at El Celler de Can Roca, Guy Savoy in Paris, Albert Adrià in Barcelona, Martin Berasategui in Lasarte-Oria, Jonnie Boer at De Librije, Joachim Wissler at Vendôme, Sven Elverfeld at Aqua, Chan Yan Tak at Lung King Heen, Tetsuya Wakuda in Sydney and Singapore, and more than thirty others across Europe, Asia and the Americas. I interviewed them first for A Wealth of Insight: The World’s Best Chefs, in their own words, and drew on those conversations again for The Luxury of Attention, where they appear alongside the hoteliers.

The pairing was the point. A chef at the pass and a general manager in the lobby are doing the same job: holding a standard, every service, through other people’s hands. The chefs describe it in their own terms. Creativity, they say almost unanimously, rests on discipline and on the rules of the craft. Perfection does not exist as a dish, only as a moment, and the pursuit of it is kept healthy by humility and by the next service. The kitchen they describe is, in most cases, calmer than the one they trained in, and several of them say so plainly: the shouting kitchen produced fear, and fear produces bad food.

Their answers on mentors are the most personal in the books. Many of them name the chef who shaped them in the first sentence, and several describe the correction they still remember thirty years later. Each profile below gives the restaurant and the role, the idea the chef carries in the book, and a line or two in their own voice from the earlier book.