WHAT I LEARNED WORKING AT A MICHELIN STAR RESTAURANT
Psst… food isn’t my real job.
I actually work in tech. But last March, I quit my job at Meta to cook for a Michelin star restaurant in Copenhagen.
Here, I’m sharing what I learned from the experience. For the sake of sharing a unique take on the subject, I’ll skip the lessons on processing pickled pinecones and get straight to what’s applicable to other people who work in corporate jobs.
In April and May 2023, I worked at two Michelin star restaurants in Copenhagen. I had worked briefly in restaurants before (mainly in the context of ramen) but this was my first time (aside from my own pop-ups) cooking in a fine dining setting.
Predictably, restaurant life was intense. Time moves differently on the line; with the head chef awaiting a finished dish, the clock outpaces you. After 13 hours on your feet, each extra minute drags painfully slow. I was challenged in ways I never expected, and — two months later — I walked away with a cambro lifetime of memories.
Here are three learnings applicable to nearly any business leader.
1. TIGHTEN THE FEEDBACK LOOP
The five-year old restaurant received its Michelin star within its first year of service. Since that initial recognition, the team dealt with COVID closures, near 100% turnover, and fierce competition from other Copenhagen restaurants. Still, it has maintained its Michelin star.
I served this to guests as soon as I plated it, so I saw first-hand what it meant to mess up the syrup art!
During a morning spent straining grilled leek oil, the chef patron described to me the early decisions the restaurant made to create a culture that fosters heartfelt accountability from each member of the team — a critical factor to uphold this sort of excellence. His secret? Tightening the feedback loop.
The restaurant designed nearly every process to minimize the distance between the chefs cooking the food and the diners enjoying it, helping individual contributors understand the stakes of their every decision. For example, the dining room surrounds an open kitchen, placing the guests in full visibility of the chefs making the food. Rather than enact a hierarchical brigade system like a traditional fine dining kitchen, the team delegates each course to a single chef that is responsible for its success (including its substitutes for dietary restrictions). The chefs also present each course to guests.
It’s a visceral, real-time proximity to customer satisfaction (or lack thereof) that’s unheard of in most business contexts, but it doesn’t need to be. Can businesses design their products — not just their customer feedback program — to make regular feedback collection second nature? Can process delegation occur across customer segments rather than across tasks? Pursuing feedback at the expense of efficiency might help you to redefine efficiency as your customer defines it, unlocking new profitable avenues to satisfy your customer.
2. CUT THE TAPE
For storage, restaurant ingredients are placed in separate plastic containers, and the containers are labeled with masking tape on which chefs write the ingredient name and the date. At Nordic Michelin star restaurants — where a single-bite amuse bouche could use 20 different ingredients — the ingredient-labelling process is so common that the sharpie is the second most-used tool after the chef’s knife.
In a fast-paced kitchen, it’s much easier to rip the roll of masking tape by hand to make a label, but doing so results in jagged edges on two labels (yours and the next one). That’s why there’s a rule in the kitchen that is practically a commandment: cut the tape. Whether with scissors or a razor blade that never leaves a chef’s pocket, the masking tape label must be cut to a straight edge before use as a label. The same rule extends to placing the label in the same location on each container (next to the hole to open the lid) and removing the tape before putting a container in the dish pit.
Cutting the tape isn’t just for the aesthetic. It’s a sign of respect to your coworkers. And, when the whole team takes the same care across adjacent jobs, the tedious task of cutting tape reduces unknowns in process flow, creating new efficiencies in aggregate.
In business, we don’t do enough to optimize our hand-off to the next person. Just think of the last time you were onboarded! Think of the last time you took on a task without seeing what a successful prior example looked like. What if the last person cut the tape? What if you cut the tape, and the next person spent more time on improving the status quo? We can do better.
3. THINK LESS
In the first days at the restaurant, nerves got the best of me. My hands shook uncontrollably as I placed miniature flowers on a seaweed tart. My rye caramel dessert decorations looked rigid rather than organic — betraying my hesitation with every stroke.
Visits from friends were a simple hack for me to build my confidence back.
At the end of my first week, the chef patron pulled me aside to help. He explained how true mastery requires throwing caution to the wind. Just as with filleting a fish — where a single smooth slice produces a cleaner filet than many thought-out cuts — sometimes our analysis of each step can get in the way of the big picture. Put simply: I needed to think less.
Letting go of my internal dialogue was tough. I used the subsequent days to investigate why I struggled, and I came to learn that stress was more pervasive in my life than I realized. In business, I was able to power through stress: work harder, ignore it, push through. But stress reveals itself too easily when success is measured in millimeters or when you’re saucing a dish in front of a guest’s discerning eye.
In time, I developed means to deal with my stress rather than ignore it. I even began a morning meditation practice. Ironically, all this thinking helped me free up my mind to think less in the moment — to execute a task with abandon.
Back in the business world, I’ll be more cognizant of the invisible weight of my thousand worries. Those worries might not impact my immediate deliverables, but do they impact whether I instill confidence in others? Are they preventing me from reaching the next stage of personal growth? By not sweating the small stuff, I can free up space to take on more important challenges.
WHAT’S NEXT
After this restaurant experience, I headed back to tech. But this time I joined a food tech company! Maybe this means I’ll have more time for this blog :)
