What does it mean to be a pioneer in the food world? Like every other sector, the culinary sphere is replete with familiar names that have left their lasting and significant mark; creators of ideas, systems and practices that took hold because they offered dramatic improvements in taste, process, efficiency or safety. Some names echo through the decades or centuries – the likes of Antonin Câreme, Auguste Escoffier, Julia Child, and Alice Waters – familiar even to those with just a passing awareness of food and the culinary arts.
Although I try my best to disassociate myself from the term, my own specific sub-section of cookery is often referred to as ‘fine-dining’ which, while it represents just a tiny fraction of the global culinary output, certainly dominates in terms of the public’s awareness of the food industry and accounts for the lion’s share of column inches devoted to gastronomy. It is also populated with many who might consider themselves to be, or aspire to be, pioneers within the industry, particularly at the highest level.
There have been great leaps forward in the world of fine dining, but they come rarely and intermittently. Câreme’s adjustment of the architecture of the kitchen; Escoffier’s adoption of a hierarchical brigade system; Child’s ability to educate the wider population on culinary matters; Waters’s participation in the creation of the farm-to-table movement. These represent punctuation points within what might otherwise be seen as a system in equilibrium. These are the historical headlines, the easy touchpoints that food historians can speak to when constructing a neat narrative.
Even more recently, we have seen pioneers refusing to accept the status quo and forging new paths of their own. The modernist movement with enigmatic food-wizard Ferran Adriá as its captain, giving way to the hyperlocalism ingredient-led cooking of the New Nordic coalition spearheaded by René Redzepi et al.
Compounding the tiny changes
But history is never quite so neat: equal to (if not greater than) these once-in-a-decade realizations are the vast number of tiny, incremental changes that improve our kitchens and systems on a daily basis. Only when these are compounded and formalized do we begin to notice the changes over time.
For most of my career, I’ve tried to see everyone who enters my kitchen as a potential pioneer, no matter how experienced (or otherwise) they are. I’m never happier than when someone asks why we do things a certain way or presents a solution to a problem I didn’t even know existed until that precise moment. It has enabled me to structure my kitchen and my business in a way that is at odds with a significant number of the decades-old accepted practices of the hospitality sector, but openmindedness and free-thinking has freed me up from these ties that I had felt bound by for nearly a decade. And who knows – maybe one day one of these tiny changes might be recognized as a truly pioneering moment.
The Secret Chef
