I liked the fact that working in the kitchen was different every day – from the ingredients to the customers to the atmosphere. Everything is always exciting and changing. I liked the idea of traveling, meeting people from around the world, and learning to respect people’s differences.

In the three-year apprenticeship program, you spend some time as a waiter and managing the front-of-the-house, which I did. The idea is to give you respect and a certain well-rounded education on how all the pieces fit together. But I ended up finishing in about two years because my focus was so clear that I wanted to be a chef.

Well, when you teach others to be chefs, you can’t take anything for granted. I don’t know who learned more — my students or me. Obviously, the relationship between chef and employee is completely different from what happens between chef and student. However, I’ve found the same tools can be applied in the field. In fact, I’ve been using the skills I learned as a culinary instructor in my last seven years back in a hotel kitchen and have completely changed my approach.

Let’s face it: If everyone were French like me, we’d drive each other nuts and never learn anything. Right now in my kitchen there are cooks from eight or nine different nationalities, which I think is terrific. Our differences only make the team stronger as we learn techniques, ingredients, and dishes from each other’s cultures.

The common language is, of course, the food. Look, a book can teach you culinary information, but it is only from other people that you will learn the cultural nuances of a cuisine. And I think this has had an impact on our cooking here.

I also believe in an open-door policy: everything out in the open, from ideas to constructive criticism. After a banquet, for example, we’ll all sit down and review how things went. We talk about what a good job we did, and we talk about where we need to improve.

It’s important to change with the times, and one thing I noticed was that a lot of business travelers are now women. And they often preferred to order room service than to eat in a hotel restaurant or bar. So we developed a new in-room dining menu around a “Home Away From Home” concept. The idea is comfort food that makes you comfortable on the road. And guess what? Businessmen started eating in their rooms more, too.

In our kitchen we constantly are doing a lot of tastings, both for ourselves and for guests, and in the end everyone appreciates the dishes with the fewest components and the most attention to the way they are prepared. In a way, I guess that boils down to respect, too.