‘Top Chef’ Favorite Kevin Gillespie Is Fed Up With Chasing Perfection

The perfect dish doesn’t exist. For that matter perfection doesn’t really exist — at least not to me, not in the way that I’ve always pretended that it does. Perfection itself is an illusion. It’s the figurative mountain ascent with a false peak, whereupon climbing you come to the realization that the top is still out of reach. It strikes me that the pursuit of perfection is an act of faith that’s impossible to achieve, and yet through rare glimpses we see its beauty, feel its pull, and continue to persevere in its image.

Still, I am a perfectionist. Always have been, and always will be. Like so many of my fellow chefs, I live a contradiction in which these two personal truths coexist. It is hard to continue to climb the mountain when you know you’ll never reach the top, and this profession is not for the faint of heart. I don’t want you to take my words as proof that it’s a worthwhile endeavor; some days I think it’s probably not. Or at least not until you can find joy in the climb itself.  

Tinfoil Swans

The martyr in the kitchen

Growing up, I was drawn to people who made food. I admired them and felt like by merely preparing a meal for others, they had somehow managed to express themselves in a very profound way. Obviously as a child I couldn’t simply articulate this, at least not in an intellectual way. I did however manage to profess to my parents by the age of 7 that I wanted to be a chef, despite the fact that I’m certain I didn’t exactly know what that meant. All I knew is that I wanted to cook for others, and I wanted to be able to share with them all the things that felt important to me — especially food. 

Food felt so approachable to me, much more so than visual art or music. It felt essential, which is important for a kid who grew up in a financially unstable household. It felt like security. It felt like freedom. It felt all-consuming. 

These feelings rooted even deeper in me once I began cooking for a living. Long before anyone was inclined to call me “Chef,” I was just a naïve kid working the garde manger station at the Ritz and loving every minute of it. I loved the intensity, the breakneck pace, the passion. This was my first taste of fine dining, and the culture associated with it. A world of uncompromising precision coupled with a tolerance for pain, hunger, and fatigue nearing levels seemingly only associated with martyrdom. These were not lessons taught to us by the chef, or even our fellow cooks, but rather through osmosis. Nothing about it seemed normal or obvious, but nevertheless it felt right. And I was completely enamored with the idea of all of us young guys grinding it out, taking our beatings, and chasing the perfect dish. Perfection for perfection’s sake. 

This was all well and good for many years, and I was genuinely happy. Yet the more I grew in my career the more I was aware of the pressure my bosses felt both from the job, and from within themselves. If a lowly line cook tasked only with consistent replication, not creative vision, could appreciate the larger significance of the work they were doing, then how must it feel for the chef who is ultimately responsible for carrying the torch of creativity? 

The answer is it can feel like you are drowning, submerged by the burden to be great and create greatness night after night. Granted I have chosen to spend my career in restaurants where the idea of doing a good job is simply not enough. It’s not OK to be OK, you must strive for something more. 

Nevertheless it is difficult to live this way, to hold yourself and everyone around you accountable to an unrealistic and often punitive standard, but for me it was significantly easier than coming to the realization that regardless of how hard I work, imperfection is inexorable. 

I am what I serve

I’ve never been the kind of chef who can separate what I do at work with the way I understand myself and my significance to others. I personally identify as “Chef.” Not “Kevin” but rather “Chef Kevin.” For better or worse (and it is often for worse) every plate of food I serve is a very real representation of who I am as a person. At the risk of offending every fellow Catholic who reads this I feel there is a certain transubstantiation that takes place for me when I cook for others. A piece of me, a whisper of my humanity, makes its way onto every plate. It’s honestly one of the only ways I know how to communicate in a deep and meaningful way with outsiders. 

The problem is that in every one of those dishes served I see mountains of imperfection, covering the plate, rim to rim, spilling off the sides, and landing in big heaping pools of shortcomings and inadequacies. Choking me. Making me sick. It’s likely to happen every day, and not just to me, but to many of my friends, peers, and mentors. Perhaps even to a few of my heroes as well.

The more time I spend in a kitchen, around chefs and creatives, the more I realize that for us to do our best work and survive these contradictions we must be willing to balance our intensity with our humanity, to show some degree of personal vulnerability. The problem is that this door can accidentally be left open, leaving you at risk of lasting damage to your own sense of self and sometimes even causing harm to those closest to you. 

Perfection can be a recipe for disaster

It has taken me many years to realize — and be willing to admit — that without guardrails the quest for perfection can be a recipe for disaster. It can leave a wake of abuse, both mental and physical, that carries so much further than we can imagine, often leaving its mark on the young impressionable people who have come to us to learn. Each time we choose to raise our voice with our team in an effort to publicly condemn a minor mistake we are lending validation to behavior we know stands in the way of progress. Every deprecating word holds in it the ability to undo years of personal growth. 

Our own quest for control and validations stands in direct opposition to providing mentorship. So much so that rather than being able to teach them the finer points of our craft, we substitute a lesson in living with the paralyzing blend of anxiety and egoism, equal measures of intensity and emotional impermanence. Formed in our own image, the next generation of “angry chef” is let loose on the world, admired, and feared, and suffering silently for their “art” while never realizing that it doesn’t have to be this way.

The lies we tell ourselves

Perhaps this is simply a question of who we do all of this for. Why do I feel the need to constantly fight an uphill battle that has caused me so many sleepless nights, and even cost some of my friends their lives? 

I’d like to think I do it because it’s meaningful, but something deep down tells me that’s a lie I’ve fabricated to make this all OK. Certainly the pressure to get a great review has something to do with it, knowing that often this is the difference between financial success or closure. Or maybe it’s the fear of having my hard work criticized publicly that has kept me vigilant. 

While those have to play a role to some degree or another I think the honest explanation is that I do all of this because I think it’s what is expected of me. It seems to me that for most of my career the dining public has wanted a chef to be part rockstar part philosopher, and when I signed on to be one, I silently agreed to go along with the nonsense. At least for a while, but I think that the time has come for me to say goodbye to this antiquated way of thinking, and aspire to something greater. 

Picking passion over perfection

 This doesn’t mean that I have abandoned precision and focus, but I do believe I am beginning to understand that they are only a few of the many skills a chef must embody. And while I certainly champion living in a way that feels personally authentic, I know my authentic self enough to know that I can often lose sight of the simple truth that food, and cooking for others, is meant to bring joy to this world, not pain. Perhaps this is why I have always subconsciously shied away from some of the more modern techniques and embraced a simpler style. I am self aware enough to know that if I don’t let my heart lead the way my food will become cold and indifferent, rather than spirited and uplifting. 

Chefs owe it to themselves, their team, and their guests to cook with passion, but we must be able to tell the difference between real crises, and those that are self-manifested out of our need to chase edible perfection. And while every misplaced garnish or unevenly caramelized surface will likely still cause me to wince, I understand that the discomfort of embracing imperfection is bringing me closer to becoming the chef I truly wish to be. Not a joyless tyrant, but an empath. Someone who values progress over perfection, and who fosters creativity alongside acceptance.