When posting an advert for a kitchen porter you may get hundreds of applications. You can’t go through them all; you need to have a system. I always go by the best-sounding name. This is how I came to invite Hernan David Geitzinger for an interview. I could not imagine what a guy with such a name would even look like. It turned out that he looked like a short, thin 12-year-old boy, though he was 26 at the time. The work is hard, I explained to him, plenty of running and heavy lifting; I don’t think it’s for you. But he asked to do a trial shift, so he got to do a trial shift, and after two hours he was offered a job. We named him HD for short, and he turned out to be not only a terrific kitchen porter but also a natural-born leader. He quickly moved from porter to prep, from prep to chef and is now one of the best chefs (and one of the best people) I know.
