I’ve been in this industry long enough to have been both the problem and the solution.
Early in my career, I spoke to my team without an ounce of respect. I thought pressure was the same thing as standards. I thought volume was the same thing as leadership. I learned — slowly, painfully — that it wasn’t getting me anywhere. More than that, it was costing the people around me something they couldn’t always name but could always feel.
The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”
— PHIL JACKSON
What changed was this: I learned to be firm without being cruel. Clear without being cold. To give my team the right tools, the right context, and the right environment — and to trust that when you do that, you don’t need to rule through fear. That realisation didn’t arrive overnight. It came from watching good people walk out of great kitchens, burned out and broken, because no one thought their wellbeing was worth protecting.
We are churning cooks. Producing technically capable hands, but not necessarily people who are deeply passionate — people who want to reshape flavour, challenge convention, and influence the way we cook and eat for the next 25 years. That’s a sustainability problem. And it starts with culture.
People will forget what you said. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.”
— MAYA ANGELOU
What changed was this: I learned to be firm without being cruel. Clear without being cold. To give my team the right tools, the right context, and the right environment — and to trust that when you do that, you don’t need to rule through fear. That realisation didn’t arrive overnight. It came from watching good people walk out of great kitchens, burned out and broken, because no one thought their wellbeing was worth protecting.
We are churning cooks. Producing technically capable hands, but not necessarily people who are deeply passionate — people who want to reshape flavour, challenge convention, and influence the way we cook and eat for the next 25 years. That’s a sustainability problem. And it starts with culture.
To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.”
— DOUGLAS ADAMS
In the corporate world, 360-degree feedback is standard practice. Honest, anonymous, structured — designed to surface the pulse of a team without becoming a vehicle for grievance. There’s no reason hospitality can’t adopt a version of this as part of how we evaluate and award excellence. Not as a vendetta. Not as punishment. But as a genuine, grace-filled conversation between a team and the people leading it.
If staff satisfaction became a component of how we award stars and hats, it would change the landscape. It would protect the next generation of cooks. It would hold leaders accountable not just for what appears on the plate, but for how it got there. And it might just slow the steady stream of talented, passionate people leaving this industry because they couldn’t survive its culture.
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
— ALBERT EINSTEIN
We celebrate chefs when they rise. We drag them through the mud when the culture they built finally catches up with them. What if, instead, we built systems that made accountability part of the journey — not a reckoning at the end of it?
That’s the conversation I want to be part of. That’s the change I think our industry is ready for.