—From a guy who’s burned both soufflés and production servers
Last year, I had a unique opportunity to pursue a lifelong ambition and go to culinary school. I took a sabbatical with the help of my team and had a year to think less about performance and optimization of software code and focus on the precision and organization of food.
When I traded my executive swivel chair for an executive chef apron, I thought I was moving from complexity to simplicity. After all, food is food, right? I was wrong. It turns out, a Michelin-star kitchen runs with the same terrifying elegance as a codebase designed to handle millions in wire transfers. And if you think deploying an app that moves millions in pension funds is stressful, try producing 100 crème brûlées when there is no room to burn one and they all need to look exactly the same.
As I got further into my culinary journey, I recall thinking that I do not make any sense. How can a guy with degrees in engineering, computer science, and business now be focused more in the artistic world of culinary creations?
A Michelin-star kitchen runs with the same terrifying elegance as a codebase designed to handle millions in wire transfers.
One of the first things that is drilled into you is organization, planning, and doing multiple things at the same time. Chefs think in parallel, not in sequence, almost executing several branches of code simultaneously. You will never be successful if you cannot perform under stress with several branches executing simultaneously. The only way to do that well is to optimize your menu and your environment. Suddenly, it dawned on me: I literally jumped from the fire into the pan.
With so many parallels, I wanted to share how slinging haute cuisine and coding high-stakes banking software are essentially the same.
Except one smells better.
Mise en Place = Architecture Planning
Before meal service, every chef preps their station like a ritual: chopped herbs, sauces made, and tools within reach. We call this mise en place, which is French for “You better not be looking for the spatula during the dinner rush.”
In software, this is architecture planning. Your tools, frameworks, and cloud environments must all be in order before a single line of code is written. If you’re building an app that handles millions of dollars, “winging it” is not on the menu.
The Brigade System = Agile Teams on Red Bull
Michelin kitchens don’t run on chaos. They run on a tight brigade system that makes Scrum look like improv night. You’ve got a saucier (sauce boss), your garde-manger (cold dish ninja), and your exec chef (me, yelling in two languages).
In dev land, the roles are developers, QAs, PMs, DevOps, and me again, this time yelling in JSON. If one person’s out of sync, the risotto or the regression test is toast.
Taste, Tweak, Repeat = Test, Debug, Refactor
Chefs don’t just cook—they taste. Constantly. The sauce may get tweaked eight times before it hits a plate. In fact, you are graded on whether you taste your food at the right points or not.
Same with code. You test, debug, mutter dark things about the QA team, then refactor until it’s silky smooth. And just like you don’t serve a raw chicken roulade, you also don’t ship code that throws a 500 error because someone forgot a semicolon. You might say the same about your customers who use your software as the diners you serve. Make sure you know that what you are giving them is what you expect.
Plating Presentation = UI
You could serve the best-tasting wagyu in the world, but no one will be impressed if it looks like a forklift dropped it on a styrofoam plate. What a meal looks like matters.
The same goes for the UI. Your backend could be the Mona Lisa of microservices, but if the login screen looks like it came from Windows 95, you’ll lose customers – and probably some self-respect.
People prejudge quality based solely on appearance. They eat with their eyes… and click with them, too.
Michelin Inspectors = Regulatory Auditors (but Hungrier)
In both worlds, there’s always someone watching. In restaurants, it’s the Michelin inspectors. In fintech, it’s the auditors. The other truth is that you need endorsement by a symbol of trust. It’s not good enough that your Mom likes your food. It needs to be someone who is respected, and you need your software users to be on your side.
One missed garnish or decimal point, and someone’s losing a star or explaining to a regulator why $10,000 was accidentally routed to a pizzeria in Rome.
Either way, you’re sweating through your whites.
Crashes are Inevitable. Grace is Optional.
Every chef has a service where nothing goes right. The oven fails, the risotto floods, and someone sets their apron on fire. In tech, it’s the midnight crash, the rollback panic, the “who pushed to prod?” standoff.
What matters in both worlds is how gracefully you recover and whether you can do it without scaring the interns.
Final Course: The Pursuit of Mastery
But the real reason cooking and coding feel so similar is that they’re both crafts. You’re solving puzzles, applying years of experience, blending logic and intuition, and always – always – improving.
If you’re building an app that handles millions of dollars, “winging it” is not on the menu.
Whether it’s perfecting the mouthfeel of a sauce or the throughput of a transaction API, you’re chasing the same high: mastery through perfection. It is no wonder that I loved my journey through culinary school. I frequently say that I learned more about teams, organization, and leadership at culinary school than anywhere else in my academic journey. However, I cannot get my management team to say, “Yes, Chef!” at the end of a meeting – yet.
And hey, if the app fails, I can at least cook dinner for you. Just don’t ask me to debug your soufflé.
Allan Zander is the CEO of DataKinetics – the global leader in Data Performance and Optimization. As a “Friend of the Mainframe”, Allan’s experience addressing both the technical and business needs of Global Fortune 500 customers has provided him with great insight into the industry’s opportunities and challenges – making him a sought-after writer and speaker on the topic of databases and mainframes.