If you ask Raymond Blanc how to age well in the restaurant business, his first answer is, “Ask me when I’m 95.”
That’s a full twenty years away, and to be fair, the legendary chef of the UK’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons shows no signs of slowing down before then. But in the meantime, there is another answer that explains both the course of his nearly 50-year career and his still burning passion for the profession: be open to change.
Blanc himself has changed careers, changed countries, changed his style of cooking. Now, he’s changing the way his restaurants work–and wants the profession as a whole to do the same.
“The industry has been careless,” he says. “As a young chef, I saw the terrible treatment of young chefs, and it still goes on in a lot of places. Working 70 hours a week is still okay in a lot of places too. Why do you think no one can find enough staff? It’s up to us to create an industry that people will want to come to.”
Blanc himself hadn’t even worked in a kitchen yet when he first experienced its unsavory side: as a young waiter, his jaw was the target of a frying pan lobbed by the restaurant’s irate chef. Soon after, he left his home in France and moved to England, where he took a waiting job in a pub and, after a lucky turn of events, began cooking though he had no formal education in it. With his then-wife, he opened his own restaurant, Les Quat’Saisons, in Oxford in the 1970s, then moved it–and drastically amped up its ambitions–to a manor house in the countryside in 1984. Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons has been one of the UK’s most acclaimed restaurants ever since, and the cornerstone of a business that has expanded to include a hotel, other restaurants, and cooking and gardening schools. It has held two Michelin stars for 40 years.
For all that experience, Blanc himself is the opposite of jaded, and his undimmed enthusiasm for the profession is striking. “Our industry is beautiful!” he cries. “ It has art, it has music, science, nutrition, gardening, organic values–it’s unbelievable! Without a single diploma you can become a great chef. This is what we offer.”
And yet he also knows that the industry has failed in significant ways, promulgating a rigid culture that has not always taken care of its people. “In the past there was so much abuse, harshness, terrible insults, and physical abuse as well. How can you bring a young person into that? That’s why there was so little retention. It’s simply because we treated people badly and nobody wants to come.”
His goal is to re-make the profession into one that, as he puts it, any parent would be glad for their child to work in. That has meant, among other changes, reducing his staff’s workweek. “I have personally worked on this for years now, and I am happy to say that in the kitchen, people now work 40 hours a week, four days a week.”
He was able to do it by raising prices–something that he admits is easier for an established restaurant like Le Quat’Saisons than for a young one–and by adapting the cooking. “We simplified the food,” he says. “We worked together to quietly reinvent it quietly and to remove all the unnecessary bits and diversions to get that purity of flavor.”
As a chef who has trained the likes of Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal, and Sat Bains, he also recognizes that a certain kind of personality wants to push more, and created a path for for those people as well. “Once we started diminishing the hours, there were a few chefs who came to me and said, ‘we want to work more because we want to be you one day,’” he recalls. “So, we started a second line for them. There’s no pressure whatsoever, and if you want to do 40 hours a week, four days a week, you are absolutely welcome. But if what you want is to be the great chef of tomorrow, if you are an ambitious young person and you want to be the best, you can work more.”
In addition to changing the hours, Blanc has also encouraged a different culture in the kitchen. “Traditionally, the industry was for rejects, for social outcasts who would just be thrown into the pool by employers who would use and then discard you. They did not train you, they did not care for you. That is over, over, over.”
Making the shift meant embracing new values and letting go of those staff who couldn’t change their own attitudes. “Sometimes people who are senior staff, who have worked with you a long time, don’t understand the modality of tomorrow and they are too much stuck in that same old frame,” Blanc says. “Before you would just say to a cook, ‘you do that.’–that’s it. Whereas now you have to explain: we do this because of that. You explain the recipe; you explain where the food comes from, and you show the technique. And yes it’s harder than just saying ‘just bloody do that.’ Emotional Intelligence is harder. Patience is harder. It takes time to train and to care for people.
“But by doing so,” he adds, “You win a million times. You create a management of support, caring, empathy. You can say ‘just bloody do it” to a person and you’ll lose them in one year. Or you can have people who stay with you and grow with you because you have provided a structure of support.”
These days, Blanc estimates the restaurant’s retention rate (in a business with 250 employees, over half of whom are women), to be upwards of 95%. “We’re creating an environment which is exciting, creative, driven,” he says. “There is no shouting in the cuisine. The staff comes in happy and leaves happy.”
He’s happy too. Forty years after launching Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Blanc is engaged in a slew of new projects, including developing a perfume garden, and making a biodynamic wine. “I love the work I’m doing. Of course there are disappointments–there always will be. But I love people, and what I do is all about creating something not for yourself. Whether it is an environment, a beautiful room, a new restaurant, a beautiful tablecloth or a new dish–it is all about giving it to somebody.”
He attributes his zest for life to good genes (both his parents lived into their mid-90s) and the undiminished sense of curiosity that keeps him developing new recipes and seeking out new knowledge and experiences. “When you talk about how do you stay alive–and not half dead, about how you stay relevant to your guests, to the media, to the young people who may want to work in the kitchen, it’s about always reinventing yourself, a constant curiosity, a will to always being looking at the next thing.”
That willingness led him, several decades into his career, to begin changing the culture in his own restaurant. And it’s given him faith that others can–and are–doing the same. “You know, it’s our industry for us to change–-we can’t blame anybody else but ourselves,” he says. “And there’s still plenty of time to do it.”
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Illustration by Sofie Kampmark.