What are the essential qualities of being a top chef?
JA: First of all I don’t consider myself a top chef. There’s a big difference between being a cook and a chef, much less a top chef, especially if you have your own restaurant. First you need to love your work, but that’s poetry and you need more than that. You need to work hard, to know how to build a team, because a restaurant can’t exist “by chef alone.” You need to teach your team in the kitchen how to reproduce your recipes perfectly because you might not always be there every day. Chefs are artists, but they also need to think. More than artists, perhaps we are fashion designers. If you are an artist, you can live your whole life by yourself as a painter. In the kitchen, that’s not possible; you need a team trained to think like you. You could be a very good cook, but a very bad chef, because you don’t know how to transmit your knowledge to the people who work with you. That’s my biggest challenge. I’m lucky though, because I love people; I love to work with people and share my s
