Chefs are strange nocturnal animals, nothing is ever good enough, perfect simply is not and should not be in our vocabulary.
A dish is never perfect, it can always look better,taste better, smell better, maybe even feel better.
We simply are never pleased with what we do, because we know very well that we can do better, of course we get proud and even arrogant if we make something good and/or nice, but we never say ” this is great!! This is the best I can ever do”.
We are in a way in the endless search for perfection ( although we know deep down we will never find it), this search is very much an obsession, we keep thinking on how it can get better.
In our line of work we have a lot of repetition, we send out the same dish for a while depending on the restaurant or hotel, so every time we send the dish out we make small tweaks, just to make it better, then the one that preceded it, looking for the perfect way, even though we will never find it.
We also have the pleasure of working a lot with others, looking at how they do something and learning new ways of how to do or how not do to something.
Because you can always learn something from everybody every day, from the head of the kichen all the way down to the lowly apprentice, the day you go to work and think ” today I’m not going to learn anything” is the day you should throw in the towel and find a new line of work.
The picture I have been painting may sound sad to the “outsider”, but to us this is simply just how it is, now there are probably some chefs that would disagree, but those people are either unmotivated, overly and stupidly arrogant or just simply stupid.
Perfect is just a word and nobody and nothing is perfect, but that does not mean that we cannot keep our eternal search alive.