Chef Oldani: Good Leaders Make Good Businesses

The kitchen is usually seen as a highly hierarchical environment. What does leadership mean to a chef?

I'm persuaded you cannot do without hierarchy if you want to achieve a good restaurant, a good company, a good country. Without rules and hierarchy, it's a con artist game, and you end up in a state like Italy today. But rules and hierarchy do not mean dictatorship; they must be accompanied by respect, ability to listen, and especially the willingness to explain to others. Only this way you can create a meaningful team.

Does a professional community of chefs exist? Which rules is it governed by?

There is no official community of chefs, nothing comparable to the institutional registers existing for other professions, but over the last decade an emerging generation of new chefs, and the desire to create rules warranting high quality standards have led to the growth of a spontaneous community. There is a measure of competition between us, which however must never turn into rivalry. Competition is a common spur pushing us to improve, to create a clean market, where new ideas can be uncovered without fear.

According, to many, Italian high cuisine suffers from its low industrial scale: for instance, individual Italian restaurants are small in comparison with their French or American counterparts. Do you see this is as a limit?

More than a limit, it's part of our historical baggage. For 70 years the Italian restaurant environment has not evolved, but with a new generation of chefs and restaurateurs, things are changing and I'm convinced that we will get there. As the slogan of EXPO Milano 2015 – "Feed the planet" – recites, the final objective of cuisine cannot be exclusivity, but quality dishes accessible by all pockets, and a change of this kind would also have a positive impact on small operators.

Television, publishing, show business. Why is the chef so popular?

Because the demand of for information by the public has grown, and the chef is a natural protagonist in this kind of pop communication, which often involves social media. At the center of it all, however, there is the customer's experience at the restaurant, but chefs need to make him/her understand what we are doing and why are are doing it that way. The fact that Bocconi, just like Harvard and London Business School, are taking an interest in Italian high cuisine, shows that there is a young public ready to get to the bottom of things.

What does innovation mean in the world of high cuisine?

In our field, innovation is limited by the fact that we will always continue to prepare meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. The only element of change is the cycle of seasons. For me in particular, innovation means knowing tradition well so to adapt it to today's taste, which suggests we should subtract rather than add, and put quality ahead of quantity.