Mentorship’s Many Forms in the Culinary World

15 Minute read

16 Feb 2026

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Part two of our three-part series explores how mentorship unfolds in different ways, from lifelong guides to kitchen lineages and institutions that shape chefs for decades.

Most of us would count ourselves lucky to benefit from the wisdom of even a single mentor. But mentorship takes many forms, from one lifelong guide to a series of figures, both ephemeral and enduring. On rare occasions, it can even manifest in an institution, such as a restaurant, that imparts everything a mentor does, without the emphasis on or direct input from a single person.

In this second installment of our three-part series, we examine each of those iterations.

The Classical Model: One Mentor, One Bond

Most people’s default idea of a mentor is a single consigliere into whose orbit an aspiring chef drifts. The elder takes a special interest in the youngster, and a bond forms that endures for years after the term of employment concludes, possibly for life.

A few passing examples of this model are featured in Part 1 of this series.

Now, let’s dig deeper into a case study that showcases the many facets of this tradition: Wylie Dufresne, the inventive chef-owner of past restaurants such as 71 Clinton Fresh Foods and wd~50, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the prolific chef behind dozens of restaurants including Jean-Georges, Four Twenty Five, and the Tin Building culinary center in lower Manhattan.

Dufresne came up in the 1980s and had the opportunity to work for some of the Mount Rushmore figures who helped define modern restaurant food. He worked for a time with the late Jean-Louis Palladin and spent two years under Alfred Portale at Gotham Bar and Grill and the short-lived One Fifth Avenue.

Dufresne recalls those jobs and employers fondly. But he says that one relationship rises to the level of mentorship: the one he has enjoyed with Vongerichten for several decades.

“For me it’s Jean-Georges, without question,” says Dufresne.

Dufresne spent approximately five years in Jean-Georges’ employ, all of it, to use his word, fabulous.

As a young line cook, Dufresne was an avid collector and reader of cookbooks, as well as a devotee of French food. Vongerichten’s inaugural book, Simple Cuisine, staggered him.

“I was completely blown away by it and the idea of taking French food and seeing it through a slightly different lens,” says Dufresne. “He’s done a tremendous amount, introducing people to different flavors, helping us understand the differences in acidity. The juices, the oils. Taking heavy stocks and lightening them up. Introducing all those herb oils. Twisting French food on its head. I still think it’s groundbreaking. There are so many people standing on his shoulders who are unaware of it.”

Dufresne dropped his resume off at JoJo, the chef’s first restaurant as an owner, and at Jean-Georges. He later realized he’d misspelled Vongerichten’s name but relentlessly followed up until he was given an at-bat.

“I got hired and I loved every minute of it at JoJo,” he says. “I still think of it as a highlight of my career.”

He went on to be a member of the opening team at Jean-Georges, occasionally helped out at Vong, and then headed to Las Vegas to help another Vongerichten protégé, the late Kerry Simon, open Vongerichten’s steak restaurant at the Bellagio.

“I loved it all, and learned a tremendous amount,” says Dufresne of that half-decade.

In addition to the invaluable experience and training that everyone who worked in the chef’s restaurants received, not to mention absorbing his instinct for herb oils and the deployment of acids, Dufresne especially appreciated the bespoke coaching Vongerichten provided him, teaching him the intricacies of butchering a chicken for stew or trussing a whole bird for roasting.

While Jean-Georges was in the final stages of construction, Vongerichten arranged a stage for Dufresne in France with Marc Meneau.

Years later, when Dufresne solicited Vongerichten’s suggestions for possible investors for wd~50, he said, “Phil and I will do it,” referring to his business partner Phil Suarez.

The involvement of one of the country’s most acclaimed toques helped secure the necessary loan to build out and launch the restaurant.

“That’s a miraculous story,” says a quasi-disbelieving Dufresne today. “It’s not something he did for a lot of other people. To this day, not sure how or why he did that.”

Right Place, Right Time

Mentorship can also be offered by many figures encountered throughout one’s life and career, as has been the case for Nancy Silverton, the LA-based chef-restaurateur and baker.

Silverton identifies three mentors in her career, one of whom is a couple. Each materialized at just the right time in her professional development and has remained available to her over the intervening decades.

The first instance was somewhat spiritual. It occurred when Silverton, exploring the professional kitchen via an internship in a Northern California restaurant, dined at Chez Panisse in 1976.

“The first meal I had at Chez Panisse was when I realized that this was my life’s calling,” she says. “I knew this was the kind of food I want to eat and food I want to cook. I guess it just resonated with me immediately, at that time in my life and my career…simply prepared, full of flavor, well sourced.”

This occurred almost by osmosis, since Silverton wasn’t yet sophisticated enough to put words to the epiphany. “I’m not even sure why. It’s not as if I was a seasoned eater,” she says.

A few years later, in her first Southern California gig at Michael’s Santa Monica, Silverton found the restaurant’s chef at the time, Jonathan Waxman, to be a template for how to interact with a team, lead, and treat colleagues with respect.

Waxman also perceived something in Silverton that echoed the kindness shown to him by that cooking class instructor in San Francisco.

Eager to get a foot in the door at the burgeoning West Side restaurant, Silverton took the first position offered to her, as cashier.

In that role, the decidedly tech-unsavvy Silverton was a disaster. Computer technology was only just finding its way into the industry, and Michael’s was among the first to employ such innovations as a computerized wine list, facilitating up-to-the-minute compendiums, and a POS (point of sale) system.

“Nobody knew how a POS worked back then,” says Silverton. “I was the cashier but I didn’t handle money; I was an intermediary between servers ordering food and myself ordering from the kitchen.”

Waxman quickly recognized that Silverton was a liability at the console and moved her into the kitchen. She’d wanted to be on the hot line, but Waxman made her assistant pastry chef. If you’ve ever wondered how or why Silverton switched from baking and pastry to savory pursuits in the current phase of her career, the answer is that baking and pastry were the switch, and that she eventually found her way back.

Silverton’s third mentor was the couple she worked for in her very next job, as opening pastry chef of Spago: Barbara Lazaroff and Wolfgang Puck. The two, she says, taught her much about being a restaurateur.

Though she now mentors a generation of future chefs, Silverton says she still seeks counsel from these figures when she needs it.

“Absolutely, I still go to them,” she says. “I don’t feel they’ve become obsolete [as mentors].”

Learning in Layers

Like Silverton, Nina Compton, chef-owner of New Orleans’ Compère Lapin, cites more than one mentor.

“My takeaway from each chef was something I learned that I applied,” she says.

From Daniel Boulud, she absorbed drive, motivation, commitment to daily excellence, and a reverence for ingredients.

Working with chef, restaurateur, and TV personality, Scott Conant, she developed a greater connection with the food and an editor’s eye for stripping a dish down to its essence.

Once, when Compton had Conant taste a main course she’d conceived, he had one main note: “This is a good dish,” he told her. “But what would make it excellent is less ingredients on the plate. You don’t need 15; you can have four, but they have to be the best.”

“That taught me how to make ingredients sing together without talking over each other,” says Compton.

Conant also helped steer Compton away from a simmering interest in molecular cuisine.

“Scott has a unique touch when he cooks. It’s very soul satisfying. I realized working for Scott that people don’t crave a foam, they crave a bowl of noodles.”

The Village Theory

For some, this takes-a-village view of mentorship can cloud the question of whether one has actually benefited from it or merely possesses a keen ability to filter the best that each leader they come into contact with has to offer.

“I didn’t have that one person who took me under their wing for five years,” says David Kinch, formerly chef-owner of the Michelin three-star Manresa in Los Gatos, California, and currently owner of The Bywater, Mentone, and Manresa Bread.

“One of the reasons I wanted to cook was to have the experience of traveling and moving around, meeting people, and becoming the best chef I could,” says Kinch. “As a line cook, I wanted to work as many stations as possible. When I could learn no more, or once I had tapped into what they had to offer me at that stage, my deal with myself was to make the cut and move on.”

Kinch trained under a series of chefs whose names thunder down history’s corridor: Fritz Schilling, Marc Meneau, and Christian Delouvrier.

“None of them took me under their wing,” says Kinch. “But each contributed something different.”

For example, during his four months staging for Schilling, the Michelin two-star chef was kind to him, encouraged his curiosity, and happily answered his questions.

“I’m not sure if that made him a mentor,” says Kinch.

Creatively, he often cites The Quilted Giraffe, where he cooked in the 1980s, as a crucial influence in helping him slip the grip of French culinary dogma and think more openly.

When Kinch was training in the 1980s, proposing an unconventional technique or preparation might have earned a line cook a smack or a sauté pan flying at them.

Barry Wine, an American attorney-turned-chef, adopted an opposing “Why not?” philosophy.

“Barry was not a technician,” says Kinch. “He was an idea guy before many people were in American cooking. The story I always tell is Barry would say, ‘We’re making a Bearnaise sauce, but we’re going to do it with duck fat instead of clarified butter.’ Some would roll their eyes at something like that, but Barry would say, ‘Why not?’”

Similarly, Kinch remembers a chefs’ confab wherein a young, then-unknown Tom Colicchio suggested leaving the rendered fat in the pan when cooking a duck breast rather than periodically pouring it off.

Colicchio believed the fat would encourage an emphatic, flavorful sear.

Other chefs would have surely muzzled Colicchio, but Wine always responded to such thoughts with, “Let’s hear what he has to say.”

“We weren’t told to mind your own business,” says Kinch.

Wine’s approach reverberated long enough that, in Kinch’s first cookbook, Manresa: An Edible Reflection, he includes an essay titled “My Creative Mentor: Barry Wine,” which precedes a series of recipes inspired by the chef.

Kinch says that he never found the absence of a devoted, classical mentor to be a deficit.

If he needed answers he couldn’t obtain from a past employer, he would seek out the best person to counsel him. For example, he reached out to Thomas Keller on more than one occasion to pick his brain about what Keller had done when he was just starting out.

As with Silverton and that first meal at Chez Panisse, Kinch recalls being “incredibly inspired” by Alain Passard. “But I never spent time in the Arpege kitchen.”

In Kinch’s view, that doesn’t hamper the ability to draw from him.

“These are inspiring people,” he says. “Even if you don’t work for them, you gain knowledge, experience, and insight.”

Kinch sums up his disposition toward the notion of mentorship thusly:

“I feel lucky and blessed in that I had the right person who could have been a mentor.”

David Kinch and Barry Wine. Credit: Barry Wine

When the Institution Becomes the Mentor

The most unexpected mentor is one that takes nonhuman form, which in the culinary world can mean a restaurant.

It sounds odd, but a select few institutions have become benevolent haunted houses. The places themselves are imbued with the qualities defined by their founders and leadership, to the extent that one need not interact directly with those key figures to glean them.

The example that comes immediately to mind, because it has endured the longest, is the aforementioned Chez Panisse.

Just as mentees refer to their mentors as “Chef” for life, many consider Chez Panisse a professional home to which they can return when in need of respite or reflection.

By the same token, the restaurant, like a parent seeing a child off into the world, allows for sabbaticals and sojourns. Go ahead and see the world, Sweetie. We will keep your room here for you when you are ready to come back.

Waters herself has commented on this aspect of her enduring passion project: “This place has always been a little bit of a commune.”

Case in point: Suzanne Goin tells a story about writing to Waters and being invited in to meet not with her, because she was away, but with “somebody over here.” She ended up conferring with the chef of the upstairs café at the time, Catherine Brandel, who explained the pros and cons of working in France, then invited Goin to cook at the restaurant and audition for a job.

For most of its 20 years, Grant Achatz’s Alinea, the progressive Chicago restaurant, has served as an incubator of talent and an oracle of ambition and precision.

Achatz himself functions as a mentor to many, as evidenced by the out-of-house series he did with former intern Greg Baxtrom at Brooklyn’s Olmsted and at Dave Beran’s Seline in Santa Monica in 2025 to celebrate Alinea’s two decades in business.

But the restaurant has also become synonymous with those qualities.

The same might be said of Bushwick, Brooklyn’s Roberta’s, which helped disseminate a stripped-down stylistic ethos, an experimental spirit, and a commitment to bread baking that have been absorbed by scores of alums.

These restaurants have served as mentors to guests as well as employees. The ones that attain this position are usually those that show us a new way to eat or to experience a meal. And then, happily changed, we all, chefs and diners alike, move on together into the future.