Learning by Cooking and Reputation Building: A French Recipe to Become a Top Chef

In this paper, we analyze the careers from a large sample of top French chefs over more than twenty years and link it to the success or reputation of the restaurants where they have worked. We investigate what are the determinants of success and the dynamics of performance and reputation, stressing the importance of the quality of apprenticeship and mentoring. We document that the prestige of the restaurant where individuals work is on average declining along the career. More importantly, we find that the quality of apprenticeship is strongly related to the future success as chef, even when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. This suggests that talent is partially transferable between a mentor and his/her apprentice.