One thing I always say is being a great chef today is not enough - you have to be a great businessman.
Wolfgang PuckRead
I always tell people that they are really the critics. If people come three times a week to your restaurant they are the ones who find something they really love.
Interpretation
The true measure of success in a restaurant is the loyalty of returning customers who appreciate what you offer.
In this quote, Wolfgang Puck emphasizes that loyal customers are the true critics of a restaurant. They return not just for the food, but for the experience and connection they feel, highlighting the importance of identifying and valuing the opinion of those who genuinely enjoy your work.
In practice
In a speech about customer service at a culinary convention.
One thing I always say is being a great chef today is not enough - you have to be a great businessman.
Restaurants are like having children: it's fun to make them, maybe, but then you have them for good and bad. You are going to have to raise them and if something goes wrong when they are 30 years old, they will still be your little boy.
I learn more from the one restaurant that didn't work than from all the ones that were successes.
A good chef has to be a manager, a businessman and a great cook. To marry all three together is sometimes difficult.
A lot of chefs are traditional and do it very well. But the ones who are the most successful are the ones who change things. That is why someone like Heston Blumenthal is a genius.
There is no value with just one restaurant or with one person. The brand has to be bigger than the person.
Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. Cooks have their ways of saying grace too... Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it.
Fake food -- I mean those patented substances chemically flavored and mechanically bulked out to kill the appetite and deceive the gut -- is unnatural, almost immoral, a bane to good eating and good cooking.
Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.
Get up early and go to the local produce markets. In Latin America and Asia, those are usually great places to find delicious food stalls serving cheap, authentic and fresh specialties.
I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make.
We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.
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