The price I paid: the real cost of being a culinary game changer

As we look towards the World's 50 Best Restaurants awards in Melbourne, the question here at Good Food is "what does it actually take to be the best?"

The first time Noma secured the No.1 spot in 2010, Bloomberg reported 100,000 people tried to book a table overnight. According to The New Yorker, when El Celler de Can Roca took the gong in 2013, they broke the Spanish internet with 2.5 million booking requests in the first 24 hours. But, as a chef, what sort of sacrifice does it take to turn those tables and to make that list?

While the urge to be at the pointy end of "Best Restaurant" lists comes from different places for different people, the sacrifice for everyone is the same. "You give up everything," says chef David Thompson, whose Bangkok restaurant Nahm is 37th on the World's 50 Best list, and fifth in the Asian Top 50.

For many of the world's best chefs, they're No.1 because the rest of their life is not. Friends, family and partners take a back seat from the moment their restaurant opens its doors.

"It's insane. The fruits of it can be fantastic," says Thompson, whose unrelenting, unapologetic perfectionism and intelligent approach to cooking is somehow both academic and alchemical. "But the fruits can be bitter and hollow too. To get to the top I'll ask you for almost everything. That's the cost that every successful person has had to make."

Brett Graham, head chef and owner of London's the Ledbury (currently placed 14th on the World's 50 Best list), is feeling the sacrifice acutely at the moment. His wife of 17 years is used to going to parties and dinners alone as he grafts 16 hours a day in the cramped basement of his Notting Hill kitchen. But they've just had a baby, and that has changed things. "I can only put my daughter to bed a maximum of two nights a week," says Graham. "And if I've got the week the wrong way around – days off earlier in the week or later the following week – sometimes it can be nearly two weeks."

Certainly hospitality is an industry famous for its high rates of divorce, and it's frighteningly easy to let a career as all-encompassing as being a chef take over. So Massimo Bottura chooses to incorporate his family life into the business. One of the most gifted chefs in the world (his restaurant Osteria Francescana currently places No.1 on the list), work/life separation has never even been a conversation.

At the top tier, it's not unusual. But to create an environment that encourages life, culture and family within the kitchen is, a little bit. "Lara says that she married the restaurant, she didn't marry me," says Bottura. "And she was right. The day I asked her to marry me was the day I opened Osteria Francescana 22 years ago."

And so his wife, his two children and the restaurant team all work as a whole. They holiday together. They eat together. At the recent wedding of chef Takahiko Kondo, practically the whole restaurant flew to Mexico together to celebrate. "This is the way we play," says Bottura. "We fight together. We share, and we win together."

While many restaurant kitchens of 2017 are characterised by sleek open spaces, induction cooking, chefs armed with tweezers, immersion circulators and a human resource-led approach to management and training, some top chefs do not believe success can ever come without the rigidity and harsh discipline of the past.

Brett Graham is one such chef who's reluctant to dismiss the benefits of a tough, structured kitchen. Stripes still need to be earned. "It's good to have a bit of balance," he says. "Going through the ranks, you have to be disciplined to last in this trade. Sometimes you'll look on the other side and you've got people who just want to be famous. Or they go and do a stage somewhere like Noma. They might be able to pick up 15 pieces of wood sorrel with a pair of tweezers but they can't roast a chicken."

But where do you draw the line? When is a kitchen a tightly regimented galley that arms its crew with the right skills to push on and create, and when does it become a softer, more collaborative workspace? And is that actually a good thing?

"While kitchens have changed dramatically for the better, I'm not convinced," says Thompson. "You've got to pay your dues to make it in this business. And you've got to work beyond the norm. And so as much as I love the idea of a normal working environment with normal working hours, would it ensure the success of your kitchen? No. And it won't be the case in any career where the intention is to be world-class."

Perhaps one of the biggest pressures facing chefs in 2017 is the fact that just being a cook is no longer enough. It is equally a matter of business. And then there are the sponsors, the tours, the events, the competitions. Will you be the type of chef who requires the aid of a financial backer, or will you remain independent (and therefore, probably poorer for a lot longer)?

Bottura, for instance, decided early on that this would be a labour of love instead of a money-spinner. "We've never been able to invest lots and lots of money in the restaurant," he says. "We grew very slowly, year by year. And you think about it – Osteria Francescana has been there 22 years."

Over those decades, the restaurant has evolved into a pilgrimage for young chefs and diners alike. Bottura's love of art, food, history, culture and music combine in a way that's intellectual but not precious. Experimental, yet rooted in Italian history. Completely off the wall, yet created with such precision, care and technical proficiency that it becomes so much more than a sum of its crazy parts.

"I think it's much more than just a restaurant. I think we create a new hope," says Bottura. "If I can do what I did in a small restaurant in a shabby street in Modena, nothing is impossible. And by ourselves. I was looking at a picture a few days ago. There's a photograph of me on the stairs scraping the walls. This was January 1995, two or three months before opening. And you know, me and Lara were looking at those pictures and saying 'do you remember when we had to sell the motorcycle to get this and pay for that?' We know how much it costs. Not in terms of money, but in terms of sacrifice. It was extremely difficult ... extremely difficult."

Certainly, no one with their head screwed on the right way enters hospitality to make their fortune.

"The sweet innocent naivete of opening a new restaurant no longer exists in 2017," says Thompson, who's had to learn over the years to give as much love to the bottom line as he does to the kitchen line. "Increasingly, as a cook, you have to be a businessman too. There are very few cooks that have both within their character and that's why so many restaurants fail, particularly when run by chefs. Impassioned as they are and as fantastic as their food might be, if they're not aware of how their business is performing, they're f---ed."

Maybe the most important reality of taking a path that's well-trodden, but no less difficult for it, is having to ask yourself some difficult questions. Who are you cooking for? What are you striving to achieve? It's not uncommon for chefs and restaurateurs to create restaurants to please critics and land on lists. But Thompson thinks that ultimately, that is a fool's game.

"I never went into it to be world-class," he says. "That's not my driving force. To do well drives me. To do the best that I can drives me. It's internal, not external. If one starts to listen and read and take notice of what's written about one, it's very dangerous because you either become puffed up or you become despondent when the press leaves you. It's a cycle I've seen again and again, and I've been in the industry longer than most.