Becoming Better, One Day at a Time

JETHRO VINCENT

With over 20 years in hospitality, Chef Jethro Vincent is known for his creativity, versatility, and passion in the kitchen, as well as his ability to inspire his team and guests. Originally from New Zealand, he began his hospitality journey at 16. After gaining experience at home, he moved to London, where he worked at one of the city’s Top 50 “Local Eats” restaurants and continued to shape his career.

He has worked in some of the world’s most exclusive kitchens, including a Relais & Châteaux lodge in New Zealand, where he discovered his true creative calling. His journey later took him to Bali, leading the culinary group 8 Degree Projects and helping build well known venues such as BIKINI, Sisterfields Café, and Bossman Burgers. After eight years, he joined the Kilo Collective as a chef partner, opening Maize and launching Kilo Kitchen in Saudi Arabia. Most recently, he opened Bokashi Pererenan, a contemporary Japanese inspired restaurant, while continuing to collaborate on projects in Bali and internationally through pop-ups and culinary consultancy.

Where the Love for Food Began

Cooking was once just a job for Jethro Vincent. That changed ten years into his career while working with chef James Stapely at a Relais & Châteaux lodge in New Zealand. Working alone in the kitchen, he was placed in pastry an area he wasn’t confident in. With the pressure to create a new dessert every day, he discovered he loved it. When a photo of his dessert was used to promote the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, he knew cooking was his calling.

The Challenge That Shaped Me

After 26 years in the kitchen, rarely taking more than a few weeks off, Jethro Vincent found himself in an unfamiliar place. His consultancy had ended, and he decided to step away from the kitchen in a full-time role. For the first time, he felt the loss of structure and identity that work had always provided, along with a fear of becoming irrelevant. That pause forced him to re-prioritise his life and finally take steps toward building the vanity project he had long dreamed of. Without the daily noise of the kitchen, he was left with his thoughts and the challenge of facing them.

What’s one rule you live by in your industry or your work?

For Jethro Vincent, having clear goals matters, but what truly counts is the daily act of showing up. This mindset is ingrained in chefs, though it often goes unnoticed that it applies beyond the kitchen. As his focus shifted from work to fitness, he followed the same principle: train today and trust that tomorrow will take care of itself. The aim is not perfection, but steady progress. By being a little better each day and trusting the process, the goal will follow.

What’s one lesson you wish the next generation of chefs or young creatives understood sooner?

He believes one lesson young chefs and creatives should understand sooner is the importance of mistakes. While writing a book about helping everyday people become better cooks, he often returns to the idea of becoming a master of mistakes. For him, a single mistake does not determine whether someone reaches their goal. What matters is how they take in what went wrong and adjust their next move. The sooner young chefs see failure as something positive, the faster they will grow.

The key principle here is accepting that the individual mistake doesn’t determine whether you reach your goal; what matters is how you absorb what went wrong and adjust your next move.

"Small, smart choices, repeated consistently over time, lead to radical differences.” -Darren Hardy