The mentors and the people they trained

Chapter 2 of The Luxury of Attention is about the apprenticeship, and it is built from the people collected here. Eric Ripert still quotes Gilbert Le Coze, his mentor and the co-founder of Le Bernardin, on what to do with a bad review. José Andrés remembers the day Ferran Adrià sent him to find the best dessert cart. Chan Yan Tak describes the patience the junior years demanded in a traditional Chinese kitchen. Sven Elverfeld remembers a young superior who encouraged him onward. On the hotel side, Krister Svensson, James Low, George Cozonis, Taljinder Singh, Ayman Gharib, Brian Gullbrants and Anneke Brown each name the general manager or the early job that fixed their idea of what the work is.

Reading them together, three things stand out. The mentors taught by showing: with their hands on the mise, the table setting or the report, and almost never by lecture. The corrections that lasted were given in private and calmly, and the people who received them describe the moment with gratitude decades later. And the apprenticeship was long. Nearly every person here spent years at the bottom of an operation before anyone handed them authority, and nearly every one of them now says those were the years that mattered.

The profiles below are the people the chapter draws on. Each gives the mentor or the early post that shaped them, in their own words where the earlier books record it.