> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://blog.rouxbe.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Slow It Down to Speed It Up - URL: https://blog.rouxbe.com/slow-it-down-to-speed-it-up/ - Published: 2026-10-06T14:20:43.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-06T14:20:43.000Z - Author: Scott Samuel - Tags: culinary Before I ever said the words "slow it down to speed it up" out loud, someone showed me what they meant — I just didn't have the language for it yet. It was 1998\. I was the executive chef at Brie & Bordeaux in Seattle, and word was starting to spread about a place in Napa Valley called The French Laundry. Thomas Keller was still relatively early in building the reputation that would later make him, well, Thomas Keller. I did the only reasonable thing a 28-year-old chef with more nerve than sense would do: I wrote him a personal letter, packed it with my menus and a few reviews from the local paper, and sent it Priority Mail. He opened it. I know because I called the restaurant not long after, asked for him by name, and he actually picked up. Before I knew it, I had an invitation to spend the summer as a guest chef at The French Laundry — working stations, learning the menus, and absorbing a level of focus on ingredients and finesse I hadn't encountered anywhere else. One afternoon that summer, in 100-degree Napa heat, I was moving fast — rushing to the walk-in for something, grabbing it, and leaving the door wide open behind me without a second thought. Chef Keller walked in, and instead of the reaction I braced for, he simply said, "Let me show you how to open and close a walk-in door." Then, calmly, he walked me through it: how to move with control instead of speed, how to close it gently so the cooler didn't have to fight to hold its temperature — "like a ballerina," he said. He never used the phrase "slow it down to speed it up." He didn't need to. He'd just handed me the whole idea in the span of one walk-in door. *From Napa to the Classroom*: That lesson sat with me for years before it found its words. In the early 2000s, I ran fourth-quarter fine dining at Seattle Culinary Academy — a real restaurant, inside a five-quarter program, serving real lunch to real paying customers who had no idea the person searing their scallops had learned to do it eleven days earlier. I also helped fifth-quarter students build their own "chef of the day" menus. Every two weeks, the entire menu changed to a new cuisine, so students could work through techniques from all over the world. Which meant every two weeks, we started over. New dish, new region, new technique, new chance to feel completely out of your depth. That overwhelm was predictable, and so was what happened next: the moment students felt behind, they sped up. Hands moved faster. Knife work got sloppier. Someone would forget a step they'd nailed in practice an hour earlier, simply because the kitchen got loud and the clock got loud right along with it. That's when I'd stop the line. "Slow it down to speed it up," I'd say. You can only do one thing at a time, and you can only do it as fast as you're actually capable of doing it well — no faster, no matter how much the ticket rail is judging you. Use the mise en place you set up. Trust the technique you practiced. Take it one step at a time, and don't let the noise of the moment take the wheel. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd cross-stitch onto a pillow, but it works. Kitchens are chaotic by design — heat, noise, a dozen tickets firing at once — and the instinct in chaos is always to rush. Rushing feels like progress. It rarely is. The calm cook, the one who slows down enough to actually be present for the dish in front of them, gets through service faster and cleaner than the one flailing at full speed. I still hear from former students on this one — calls, texts, the occasional email out of nowhere — telling me that line followed them long after they left my kitchen. Into opening their own restaurants. Into running a line under real pressure for the first time. Into building businesses with more moving parts than any menu I ever taught. Different chaos, same fix: when things speed up around you, that's exactly when you slow down. *Slow it down to speed it up*. It's held up for over twenty five years, and still applies to the work I do today.and I don't expect that to change.