Kitchens in the 18th century were anything but quiet—hot, noisy, chaotic, and where drinking was commonplace. Much of the order we see today came from the French fine dining scene.
French Chef Georges Auguste Escoffier wanted to organize this chaos. Drawing inspiration from his military background, he developed the Kitchen Brigade System, or brigade de cuisine, a hierarchical structure that organizes kitchen staff in professional kitchens.
The brigade system organizes kitchen staff into distinct roles, each with defined tasks. The typical hierarchy starts with the Chef de Cuisine at the top, who oversees all kitchen operations and menu planning.
The Sous Chef and Chefs de Partie are directly below and manage specific stations. Next in line is the Commis, who assist station chefs. Finally, you have the apprentice, who is learning the trade.
The system redefined the French fine dining scene; today, France has the most Michelin-starred restaurants anywhere in the world. Kitchen Brigade System didn’t just enhance productivity; it was designed to elevate standards of food preparation.
The moment you walk into a Michelin-starred restaurant, you know you’re walking into a place that doesn’t believe in compromises. Chef de Cusine runs the kitchen like a military general, demanding absolute loyalty, but when the team screws up, they take all the blame.
Late Anthony Bourdain put this more eloquently in his best-selling book, Kitchen Confidential, and his interview with Gardiner Morse for Harvard Business Review.
“In my kitchen, no one will have two bosses. All orders will come from me. If something bad is coming down the pike, it will hit me first, and I will disseminate that information. I will fight fiercely to make sure that criticisms of my crew, from the floor staff or elsewhere, come through me. And if something goes wrong, whether I’m in the kitchen or not, I will never, ever blame anyone else. I delegated a job to them. If they’ve screwed up, it’s my fault. I return loyalty with absolute loyalty.” – Anthony Bourdain.
Escoffier’s brigade system has gained widespread acceptance, and restaurants have adapted it to address their culinary operations and cultural nuances.
The Kitchen’s Influence: Mapping Marketing Roles to Culinary Roles
Much like Anthony Berzatto, the young chef from The Bear who transforms a struggling food joint into a fine dining establishment with the brigade system, can a marketer achieve similar success?
When you work with a fledgling startup, you have a flat hierarchy because you can’t afford a team of specialists. You struggle with getting daily tasks closed; as Chef de Cusine, you might be a saucer one day and the sommelier next.
If you’ve worked in a startup, you’ve already experienced what it means to work in such an environment. To give you a frame of reference, you’re looking at organizations with less than $100 million in revenue.
However, a flat hierarchy slows you down when you walk into an organization with over $500 million in revenue. The marketing department in such organizations follows a matrix structure, much like the brigade system.
Marketing’s Brigade: Hiring
The CMO is effectively The Chef de Cuisine, where your goal is to hire the right people, set direction, and enforce standards. If you ask any excellent Chef de Cuisine what they spend most of their time on, they will most likely reply hiring. This reminds me of a scene from La Grande Maison Tokyo.
Rinko Hayami (Kyōka Suzuki) is a chef who recently moved to France. She hopes to earn her first Michelin star by working at L’Ambroisie, a Michelin-starred restaurant. As she interviews for a position at L’Ambroisie, Rinko meets Natsuki Obana (Takuya Kimura), a two-star Michelin chef. Considering his disgraced past, Natsuki learns that he doesn’t stand a chance to be interviewed, so he tries to help Rinko to clear the test instead.
Rinko doesn’t take his advice seriously, as she wants to pass the test using her intellect, but she later fails to do so. When Rinko meets Natsuki after the interview, she challenges him to cook the same dish. Natuski accepts the challenge and cooks the same dish for her. As Rinko tastes the dish, tears roll down her face; she realizes her cooking skills are not worthy of a Michelin-starred restaurant.
But Natsuki realizes Rinko’s potential as she recalls every ingredient Natsuki used just by tasting his dish. He also sees Rinko’s immense passion for cooking and offers to teach her everything he knows if she joins him in starting a fine dining restaurant in Japan.
If you compare the attrition rates in fine dining restaurants and marketing teams, they are similar at 30% annually. Fine dining restaurants that consistently rank among the top have one thing in common: their ability to retain talent.
The sum is greater than all parts. Some of the best Chef de Cuisine (CMOs) I know have mastered the art of assembling teams and blending people from diverse backgrounds to create exceptional outcomes.
The Secret Ingredient: Communication and Collaboration
Professional kitchens are chaotic. Much of the communication is verbal and uses a call-and-response format. If you visit a local Darshini (quick-service restaurant serving South Indian food), you will see this in practice.
When you place an order, the server shares it with a line cook, who calls out to relevant stations. Each cook repeats the order and calls when the dish will be ready. Sometimes, the line cook even passes handwritten notes to convey specific information.
You compare this to a modern-day marketing department; the communication tends to be more varied and utilizes multiple channels. The approach is more collaborative, considering ideas and feedback often shape the output.
Often, the way to avoid miscommunication is to share the information with the intended recipient and ask them to repeat what they have heard. This practice eliminates ambiguity and smoothens communication. For larger projects, it means creating extensive documentation, approach notes, guidelines, and briefing documents. While documentation is tedious and sucks the joy out of work, they become critical when you’re working with teams spread across multiple time zones and geographies.
Experimentation: El Bulli Effect
El Bulli is a revered restaurant that once served customers from all over the world. Set over a rugged cliff overlooking the Mediterranean in Catalonia, Spain, the restaurant would serve only 8,000 dinners a season but received more than two million requests.
What set the restaurant apart was its commitment to creativity and experimentation. The menu changed frequently—often 30 times a year—reflecting the seasons and the chefs’ evolving ideas. Each dish was expertly crafted, often taking months, making every visit a unique adventure in taste.
El Bulli’s unique culture made it a magnet for chefs worldwide, attracting the likes of Gagan Anand, Andoni Luis Aduriz, Massimo Bottura, and Joan Roca.
As Chef de Cusine (CMO), your goal is to create a culture of experimentation. If you ask recent grads looking to start their marketing careers where they’d like to work, they will likely mention brands like Zomato, Zepto, and Cred.
A culture of experimentation becomes a magnet to attract talent and kills the monotony that often arises when you work in large teams. El Bulli had over 42 chefs at its peak and was awarded the best restaurant in the top 50 for five years in a row. If you’re putting in 14-16 hour work days, it is only worthwhile if you’re doing the best work of your life.
Gagan Anand learned advanced cooking techniques like reverse spherification at El Bulli, which he later adopted into his dishes, most notably in his creation of the “Yogurt Explosion.” This dish features a spherified yogurt bomb filled with mango chutney, designed to provide a unique sensory experience for diners.
Without Proctor and Gamble, we would have never had brand management as a function; a select few marketing teams/brands always set the standards for everyone else. That’s the harsh reality of the marketing world.
As a Chef de Cuisine or CMO, adopting mediocrity is the fastest way to kill your team.
A Recipe for Success: How Structure Drives Results in Any Team
There is a particular scene in the movie The Burnt where Adam Jones (Bradly Cooper), a two-star Michelin chef, starts a new restaurant after a self-imposed exile in hopes of winning his third Michelin star. He is obsessed with winning his third Michelin star.
But after a certain point, he and his team are so good at their job that they stop caring when the Michelin reviewers arrive; they treat them like any other customer. Adam trusts his team unconditionally and knows they will do their best. That is ultimately the true hallmark of a great marketing team: you have become so good at what you do that work has become muscle memory.
