An apprentice is sick of his job at a high end restaurant. It pays poorly, he’s stuck doing the menial tasks, and the head chefs don’t give him any recognition or affirmation. A manager at a rival restaurant approaches him with a deal. If the apprentice steals the restaurant’s recipes, the manager will give him a better position at their own high end restaurant—and a fat paycheck.

When the apprentice steals and delivers the recipes to the manager, the manager has one of his sous chefs make a meal based on the recipe. When the sous chef delivers it to him, the manager is disappointed—the dish completely fell flat. What went wrong?

Meanwhile, the apprentice can’t bear the shame of stealing the recipes. He quits the restaurant and comes clean to his team. He stole the recipes and gave them to the rival restaurant, and now they were in trouble. 

The rest of the chefs laugh. The apprentice and restaurant manager assumed that the secret was in the recipe—and by stealing it, the manager could copy the dish. They were wrong.

The experienced chefs know that a recipe doesn’t make a good dish. A good dish can only happen when the chef puts a bit of their soul into the dish. A chef’s practice is one of giving more and more of themselves to the dining experience. A recipe is merely a starting point.

That’s why chefs are glad to write and publish cookbooks. Unless a reader of the book is ready to practice—maybe for years—and learns how to put some of themselves into the dish, and to make it theirs, they’re not going to be able to make the same dish. In this sense, the recipe is actually a complement to the restaurant’s dining experience.