A Chef Doesn’t Have to Stay in the Kitchen
Whenever people hear that I am a chef, one of the first questions I usually get is: “What’s your favourite dish to cook?”
Or: “What do you cook best?”
It is an understandable question.
Cooking is the part of being a chef that people can see.
They see the plate.
They see the restaurant.
They see the chef in whites, moving around the kitchen, tasting, seasoning, finishing.
But after more than 15 years in food and hospitality, I sometimes find myself struggling to answer that question.
Not because I don't have dishes I love but because somewhere along the way, my understanding of what it means to be a chef became much bigger than cooking.
There was a time when I thought being a good chef meant becoming very good with my hands.
Learning technique.
Understanding ingredients.
Developing dishes.
Writing menus.
Getting faster.
Getting better.
Putting something on a plate that made someone stop and say, this is good.
And that stage mattered; you cannot skip the craft and you have to learn how food behaves before you can begin making meaningful decisions about it but I don't think a chef is supposed to spend their entire career proving that they can cook.
At some point, another question begins to emerge: What can everything I have learnt from cooking allow me to build?
That question changed quite a lot for me.
The chef you start as may not be the chef you become
Early in your career, you are often focused on mastery, you want to know how to do the thing.
Then you become interested in why the thing works.
Then, perhaps, you become interested in whether other people can do it too and eventually, you may start asking questions that don't appear on a recipe card at all.
Why does one restaurant survive while another doesn't?
Why does a menu that looks brilliant on paper become impossible during service?
Why does a dish taste different depending on who is cooking it?
How do you train someone well enough that the food doesn't depend entirely on you?
How do you price properly?
How do you build systems?
How do you develop people?
How do you create an experience that people remember?
How do you turn an idea into a business?
These questions started becoming as interesting to me as the cooking itself. Perhaps that is one of the less discussed parts of becoming experienced.
Your questions change and when your questions change, your work often changes with them.
Cooking taught me much more than cooking
I think about this a lot.
Spend enough years in a professional kitchen and you start collecting skills without necessarily realising it.
You learn organisation because service has very little patience for disorganisation.
You learn timing because everything seems to need your attention at the same time.
You learn communication because a kitchen cannot function on assumptions.
You learn problem-solving because something will inevitably go wrong.
You learn discipline because the customer doesn't care that you had a difficult morning.
You learn leadership because eventually someone is looking to you for direction.
You learn about waste, margins, procurement, standards, consistency, people, customers, pressure. and consequences.
A kitchen is a remarkably good place to learn about systems. That is one reason I now think about food differently.
I don't only see a dish;
I see the decisions behind it.
I see the people who have to produce it.
I see the ingredients that have to arrive.
I see the cost.
I see the process.
I see what happens when the person who created the dish is no longer there.
I see the system.
At some point, I stopped wanting to be the person who did everything
This has probably been one of the biggest shifts in my career. Earlier on, being good at what I did often meant wanting to be the person making the food.
If there was a dish to develop, I wanted my hands in it.
If there was a problem in the kitchen, I wanted to solve it.
If something wasn't right, I wanted to fix it myself.
But there is a ceiling to that way of thinking because if everything depends on you, you haven't really built something that can stand without you.
You've built a very demanding job.
Eventually, I became much more interested in another kind of question: Can I build something that allows other people to do this well?
Can I teach the technique?
Can I explain the thinking?
Can I create a process?
Can I train someone?
Can I develop a menu that another chef can execute consistently?
Can I create a business that doesn't collapse because I am not standing at the stove?
That requires a different kind of expertise and I think we sometimes undervalue it because it is less visible.
Nobody applauds a good system the way they applaud a beautiful plate but the system is often what allows the beautiful plate to exist tomorrow, and the day after that.
There is an evolution period that we don't talk about enough
We tend to imagine a chef's career as a straight line.
Commis chef.
Chef de partie.
Sous chef.
Head chef.
Executive chef.
And then what?
I don't think the answer has to be another title in the kitchen.
A chef might become an educator.
A consultant.
A restaurateur.
A food writer.
A researcher.
A product developer.
A hospitality strategist.
A brand builder.
An entrepreneur.
A creative director.
Or some combination of all of these. The important thing is that leaving the stove does not necessarily mean leaving the craft.
Sometimes you are simply taking the craft with you.
The chef who becomes an educator is still using their culinary knowledge.
The chef who becomes a consultant is still solving problems with the knowledge hospitality gave them.
The chef who builds a food brand is still thinking about ingredients, flavour, people and experience.
The chef who builds a restaurant group is still designing hospitality.
The form has changed but the foundation hasn't.
Teaching changed the way I understood being a chef
This is something I didn't fully appreciate when I began teaching.
When you are cooking, your body often knows things before your mind has put them into words.
You know when the heat is right.
You know when a sauce has reduced enough.
You know what the dough should feel like.
You know when something needs another minute.
But ask someone else to do it and suddenly you have to explain why.
That is when instinct becomes knowledge and that distinction matters to me.
I don't want to teach someone fifty recipes they can reproduce only when I am standing beside them.
I want them to understand the thinking underneath the recipe.
Understand the base.
Understand the technique.
Understand what the ingredient is doing.
Then they can begin to make decisions for themselves.
That is a very different kind of teaching and, in many ways, it is a very different understanding of what a chef's responsibility can be.
Perhaps our job is not only to cook what we know, but to make what we know transferable.
The kitchen gave me a language for other things
Today, I find myself thinking about systems, strategy, education, storytelling, hospitality, business development, brands and growth.
At first glance, these things might seem very far away from cooking.
I don't experience them that way.
Cooking taught me to think in systems.
Hospitality taught me to think about people.
Restaurants taught me about business.
Teaching taught me how to break knowledge down.
Travel taught me that food carries place and memory.
Building brands taught me how ideas need context before people can understand them.
The different parts of my work don't feel disconnected, they are different expressions of the same foundation.
Food is a system.
And once you understand that, you begin to see how far the knowledge can travel.
I still cook
This is important.
None of this is a declaration that I have somehow outgrown the kitchen.
I haven't.
I still care about technique.
I still care about ingredients.
I still enjoy cooking.
I still get excited about a good dish.
I still believe that there is something deeply satisfying about understanding food well enough to make something with your own hands.
But cooking is no longer the only expression of my work and I think that is okay. Actually, I think it is necessary because experience should change you.
It should change what you notice.
It should change what you question.
It should change what you want to build.
It should change what you are willing to teach.
If fifteen years in food had only made me better at cooking, I would have learnt a lot.
But fifteen years in food has taught me how to build.
Menus.
Systems.
Teams.
Businesses.
Brands.
Experiences.
Ideas.
And increasingly, other people.
So, what do I cook best?
I could give you an answer. There are dishes I am proud of, techniques I have spent years refining, things I know I can execute well but these days, I think there is a more interesting question: What have 15 years of cooking prepared me to do?
That answer is much bigger than a dish.
The kitchen gave me my foundation.
It taught me discipline, curiosity, systems, leadership and the importance of understanding what sits beneath the surface.
It gave me a way of thinking and perhaps that is what we don't talk about enough when we talk about chefs.
A chef can spend a lifetime in the kitchen but they don't have to leave everything they learnt there.
They can take it into a classroom, boardroom, business, book, brand, conversation and a new generation.
The kitchen can be where your career begins without being where it has to end.
Because sometimes becoming a better chef doesn't mean learning how to cook more.
Sometimes it means discovering what else you can build with everything cooking has taught you.
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