Great chefs, like great artists, go far beyond their materials (in this case, food) to provoke an experience that fulfills their creative vision. Unlike artists, however, they are running a business that requires putting diners in the seats, balancing costs, and managing overhead in order to turn a profit. How do these chefs express the full extent of their culinary innovativeness while at the same time as creating a return for investors?
Two recent Harvard Business School case studies explore this tension through the experience of two high-profile chefs who came up with different answers to these questions.
Located in Copenhagen, restaurant Noma routinely tops best restaurant lists. That's in large part due to the singular vision of chef-owner René Redzepi, who is obsessive about using local ingredients (only coffee is sourced outside Scandinavia) as well as creating unusual dishes such as ground grasshopper miso and live shrimp dipped in brown butter. In doing so, he has resuscitated Nordic cuisine, spawning new restaurants all over the world and expanded his own repertoire of super-local cuisine with a pop-up restaurant in London this year and another to open in Tokyo next year.
Posted By: Eric Cooley
Wednesday, January 21st 2015 at 7:43PM
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