Why the Best Chefs Often Have the Least Experience

The potwash who watches beats the CV every time. But not for the reason business people think.

There’s a fashionable idea doing the rounds at the moment. Hire people with no experience in your industry, because they’ll bring fresh thinking and they won’t be weighed down by the way things have always been done. Steven Bartlett wrote about it this week, using Prince William’s homelessness work and Apple as his examples. Stack skills that don’t usually sit together, and you get answers nobody else has.

It’s a good argument for a lot of businesses. It’s half an argument for a kitchen.

I’ve always taken the potwash over the experienced chef from down the road. Given the choice between someone who came up through my own kitchen, learned my sections, watched how we do things, and asked the right questions, and someone with five years on paper who trained somewhere that cut corners, I’ll take the potwash, and it isn’t close.

But notice what I’m actually saying, because it isn’t the same as the business idea.

Bartlett is talking about bringing in outside skills the industry lacks. The engineer who’s also a musician. That works when you want someone to question the orthodoxy. In a kitchen, a lot of the time, you don’t want the orthodoxy questioned. You want it followed. You want the sauce made the same way at seven o’clock as it was at midday, by whoever’s on the section, service after service. Consistency isn’t a limit on creativity. It’s the thing that lets the creativity happen at all.

So the case for the potwash isn’t really about fresh thinking. It’s about something simpler and older. You can teach a willing beginner anything. What you can’t easily do is un-teach a chef who’s spent years doing it wrong and calling it experience.

Bad habits aren’t a gap you fill in. They’re muscle memory. They’re the way someone’s hand moves before their brain’s caught up. The chef who’s learned to blanch and refresh badly, to season by rote, to plate at the pass without checking, isn’t a blank page you can write on. You’re writing over the top of something, and the old writing bleeds through under pressure. And pressure is exactly when it matters.

The potwash has none of that. What the good ones have is attention. They’ve been in the room. They’ve watched the section run for months, seen where it goes wrong, noticed who stays calm and who doesn’t. They’ve earned the move up by wanting it, not by turning up with a CV. That hunger is worth more than any qualification, because you can build skill on top of it. You can’t build it on top of indifference.

None of which means experience is worthless. A good chef with the right habits, trained properly, is exactly who you want. The point is narrower than Bartlett’s and, I think, more honest. Experience is only an asset when it’s the right experience. The wrong kind isn’t neutral. It’s a cost, and you pay it every service until you’ve drilled it out.

So yes, look harder at the person with no track record. But not because inexperience is a virtue in itself. Because a willing beginner costs you time, and a badly trained professional costs you time plus the fight to undo what’s already there.

The CV tells you what someone’s done. It doesn’t tell you how well. In this trade, that second question is the only one that matters.

FAQ

Is it better to hire a chef with no experience?
Not as a rule. It’s better to hire the right attitude and trainability over the wrong experience. A keen beginner who watches, learns and wants the job will often outperform an experienced chef who trained badly, because you can build skill on top of willingness but you can’t easily undo ingrained bad habits.

Why are bad habits such a problem in a professional kitchen?
Because they’re muscle memory, not knowledge. A chef who’s learned to season by rote or plate without checking doesn’t think their way through it, their hands move automatically. Under service pressure, the old habit resurfaces exactly when consistency matters most.

Does this mean experience doesn’t matter?
No. A well-trained chef with the right habits is exactly who you want. The point is narrower: experience is only valuable when it’s the right kind. Poorly formed experience is a cost, not a neutral, because you spend time drilling it out before you can build anything on top.

What should I look for when hiring a junior chef?
Attention and hunger. Someone who’s been in the room, watched the sections run, noticed where things go wrong and asked the right questions. That awareness can be built on. Indifference can’t, no matter what the CV says.

Isn’t this the same as the “hire outside your industry” advice?
Not quite. That advice is about importing skills the industry lacks to spark new thinking. In a kitchen you often want the orthodoxy followed, not questioned, because consistency is what lets the creativity happen. The case for the potwash is simpler: a willing beginner is cheaper to train than a badly trained professional is to correct.