My appreciation for cooking shows started in Kitchen Stadium with the Iron Chef. The original one — not the remake. There was something special about chefs competing against each other with a special ingredient. After the Iron Chef, I didn’t really resonate with another cooking show until Chopped. There was something special about chefs competing against each other with a basket of crazy ingredients. After Chopped, I went on another hiatus until the recent pandemic. I encountered The Final Table and my mind was blown. There was something special about chefs competing against each other within a specific cuisine.
I began to wonder. Why are these shows so addicting when the recipe for success (sorry, the pun was too easy) has stayed the same for decades: pit chefs against each other under particular thematic and temporal constraints? They are so addicting because they show us how people can innovate in an incredibly short amount of time. They tap into our imagination and draw on our visceral connection with food. These shows peak our curiosity and then satiate it with something beautiful and tangible.
Chefs are artists that have mastered the process of taking a product (food) from ideation (kitchen) to market (your table). They run kitchens with military precision and manage the chef’s line like a highly-efficient startup. But their products are highly commoditized at every level. Just think about what you always do when eating at a new restaurant — you compare it to all the other restaurants that you’ve been to that serve the same type of food. The only way they can beat their competition is to innovate.
A chef innovates in a few primary ways: (i) crafting food to its truest intent, (ii) creating fusions between disciplines, (iii) integrating ingredients in unique ways, or (iv) re-inventing our interpretation of food. There are other ways that chefs can innovate, like developing supply chain efficiencies, but our focus today will be on the four methods noted above. And, as we will see, these approaches are not mutually exclusive.
Crafting food to its truest intent. On the surface, this might not seem like innovation. But this is one of the two most difficult ways to innovate with food, along with the fourth way of reinvention. The difficulty here lies with our concept of a prototype. In my first article, “Done With Netflix? Try Philosophy.”, I briefly discussed how difficult it can be to define something as simple as a chair. Is it something with four legs? Not always. Is it something with a backing? Not always. The difficulty in defining the concept of a particular thing comes into play here because identifying what a dish’s true and faithful form is can be hazy at best.
What if a new Chinese restaurant tried to create an orange chicken dish that was absolutely faithful to its origins? Well, first off, orange chicken is not Chinese food. It is an American interpretation of Chinese cuisine. Don’t get me wrong, orange chicken is one of my favorites, but this does raise the question of what orange chicken should taste like. If it doesn’t have hundreds of years of history, how can a restaurant pinpoint what orange chicken should taste like? How should you know what it tastes like? Do you have a memory of Panda Express’s orange chicken? Is this your prototype? In this case, that would actually suffice because Panda Express is credited with developing this dish in 1987. But what about the classical burrito? Or the classical pizza (are you from New York, Chicago, or Italy)?
A chef has to pinpoint the exact flavor profile that he or she believes stays true to the origins of a particular dish, and that can mean different things for different chefs and for different customers. If you brought me a traditional egg tart from Hong Kong, it would taste quite different from an egg tart form Macau (due to the Portuguese influences). Thus, a chef must define the dish before he or she can prepare it. And once the vision is clear, the means of achieving that is a whole new challenge (e.g., should ingredients from a dish’s place of origin be used? Should different ingredients that taste better than the original be used?). The innovation comes from this process.
Creating fusions. Fusion dishes can be a home run because they can combine the “best of both worlds” as they say. Have you ever had a sushi burrito? They are incredible. These dishes, as the method suggests, requires a chef to combine different disciplines of cooking into one dish. This form of cooking requires the chef to engage in dynamic thinking (for a discussion on dynamic thinking, see my previous article “Dynamic Thinking vs. Static Thinking” (link to article), to connect their expertise in two or more areas of cooking. One of my favorite restaurants in D.C. is China Chilcano, a José Andrés restaurant that marries Chinese, Peruvian, and Japanese cuisine. Having touches of Peruvian cuisine in something like dim sum provides for a refreshing take on a classic.
Integrating ingredients in unique ways. This method of innovation is just as it sounds. By adding new ingredients to traditional dishes, something unique can be born. (Whoever added bacon to chocolate should win the Nobel Prize.) This approach requires the chef to experiment with different flavor profiles to balance out flavors at a fundamental level. Because adding new ingredients to dishes can ruin a dish, the chef needs to have a deep understanding of how something like the saltiness of bacon balances out the sweetness of chocolate.
A great example of this is how Ivan Orkin, an American who founded one of the best ramen restaurants in Japan, made his own noodles with an ingredient not traditionally used in Japanese noodles: toasted rye flour. To learn more about how Ivan’s incredible journey, I highly recommend the Chef’s Table episode on, you guessed it, Ivan Orkin. This example is also insightful because it combines the first two innovation methods I discussed above. Ivan had to define his concept of what a ramen dish should taste like (no, we aren’t talking about the pre-packaged ramen noodles that filled our dorm rooms in college) in the epicenter of ramen, Tokyo, Japan. In doing so, he added depth to his dish by integrating his Western influence into his noodles that had never been done before.
Re-inventing our interpretation of food. One of the most difficult innovations for a chef is to re-invent our understanding of food. I’m not talking about something like the cronut or cake pops — these innovations fall within our second category. This category is reserved from the truly avant garde. Think Grant Achatz, the brilliant chef that started Chicago’s Alinea. I also highly recommend his Chef’s Table episode, as it is one of the most inspirational pieces you will ever watch. He speaks about his food like tech moguls speak about their platforms and devices but with an added layer of poetic color. Grant specializes in molecular gastronomy, the practice of exploring how to transform the physical nature of food, and progressive cuisine. He, for instance, developed an edible, floating balloon with his team. How magical is that? He is able to transform dishes so completely that guests are often fooled by what is edible and what is not. Is that flower really just a centerpiece? Or is part of the meal and is it really a flower?
With this method, chefs are tasked with transformating the very nature of the food that we eat, literarly and metaphorically.
What Can We Learn?
As a quick recap, we discussed how chefs can innovate by (i) crafting food to its truest intent, (ii) creating fusions between disciplines, (iii) integrating ingredients in unique ways, or (iv) re-inventing our interpretation of food. By adapting these methods for our everyday lives or for business settings, we can learn to innovate by (i) creating objects to their truest form or intent, (ii) developing goods and services by taking cross-disciplinary approaches, (iii) integrating new features into existing goods and services, and (iv) creating something entirely new (some might call this taking something from zero to one).
Below, see some examples of how this comes into practice:
- Creating objects to their truest form or intent. Ask yourself what does a vacuum cleaner look like? You’d likely imagine a heavy, corded machine that resembles something from the 70s. But if you stop and ask yourself what is a vacuum cleaner really? You can see that a vacuum is defined by its purpose, not its form. Just look at how James Dyson designed a vacuum cleaner that should be featured at MOMA in New York. His design should be the prototype for all vacuum cleaners. They are easy to use, beautiful, and make vacuuming fun. And it looks nothing like anything that came before it.
- Developing goods and services by taking cross-disciplinary approaches. The bullet train is a great example of this. Original versions of the bullet train were slowed down by drag and produced a loud boom noise when it travelled through tunnels. To address this problem, engineers were able to rely on biomimicry to redesign the front of the train to mimic a kingfisher’s beak. Where the original front of the train collected air in front of a vehicle (like a boxy SUV), the newly designed front based on the kingfisher’s beak allowed air to pass around the train (like a sleek sports car).
- Integrating new features into existing goods and services. Voice assistants like Siri are a great example of how phone manufacturers were able to add a new feature into an existing product. Siri and her counterparts make certain tasks more convenient and allow users to go hands free.
- Creating something entirely new. This is innovation in its purest form: creating something that the world has never seen before. The steam engine, the first automobile, the first plane, the first computer chip, the internet. These aren’t just improvements, they are market defining.
Have fun. Experiment. Grab some food. And keep on exploring!
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Think well my friends,
Adam
This article is the fourth in a series of discussions focused on expanding your thinking. If you would like to learn more, feel free to connect with me on social media or subscribe to my “Weekend Thoughts” newsletter: https://www.atphilosophy.com/subscribe.
Adam advises businesses and individuals on business strategy, develops thought leadership content, and keynotes. As a business philosopher, he draws on his experiences in corporate law, sales, nonprofits, and philosophy to develop practical frameworks to shift business and individual mindsets and skillsets. He is the founder of At Philosophy and the president of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association Educational Fund. See www.adamtsao.com.
