Yes Chef, No Chef

 Have you watched "The Bear" on TV yet?  I won't spoil all the fun for you if you haven't, but it's about a world-class up and coming chef whose family owns a fast paced roast beef place in Chicago.  The family member who is the head guy at their restaurant dies and the up and coming chef returns to run the family business.  Without divulging too much detail, the plot is about the drama caused by the changes he makes to the restaurant to improve food quality and make it a super successful upscale business.

The reason I bring this up is that during the course of two seasons you hear the phrase "Yes Chef" about a million times.  Every person in that kitchen addresses everyone else as "Chef."  The cooks.  The dishwasher.  Everyone.  In fact, the actual Executive Chef of the restaurant addresses the Maitre'd as "Chef."

This was perplexing to me.  In my restaurant career, the only person addressed as Chef was the actual Executive Chef or maybe a particularly talented Sous Chef.  Except for those two people, we used real names to speak to each other.  After I thought about this for a bit I realized that the practice of calling anyone and everyone "Chef" was prevalent on most of the Food Channel's so-called "reality" shows about kitchen life.  Before I retired from foodservice I was also hearing that more and more from the younger men/women who were just starting out in the industry.  I never thought too much about it because by that point in my career I was usually the Executive Chef of the restaurant or club and that's how you address the person holding that position.  I remember that the first time I heard a Sous Chef call one of the prep cooks "Chef" it struck me as odd, but I didn't think it was worth discussing so I just forgot about it.

Before I get too far down the "Yes Chef, No Chef" rabbit hole, you should know that I started working in kitchens in the 1970's and things were very different back then.  In a traditional kitchen there is one Executive Chef, one or more Sous Chefs, and maybe a Chef de Cuisine, a Pastry Chef, and sometimes a Banquet Chef.  Then there are line cooks, pantry cooks, prep cooks, and maybe some other guys who do specific things and inhabit the lower rungs of the kitchen hierarchy just above the dishwashers.

The Executive Chef is the undisputed king/queen of the kitchen.  He/she is ultimately responsible for every plate of food that goes out of the kitchen, food purchasing, food cost management, food preparation and quality control, hiring and firing, menu design and implementation, labor cost, sanitation, and basically anything else even remotely related to kitchen operations.  He/she is highly respected and usually feared to some extent because of the exceptional skill level required to do all these things better than anyone else.  Some of these duties are usually delegated to Sous Chefs.  

Some Executive Chefs never spend a single day in the kitchen due to the difficulty of juggling all of their duties.  Others, like myself, believe that working alongside the other kitchen employees every single day is absolutely essential to building a high performance team that takes pride in their product.  Those of us who actually prepare food handle our administrative duties before the rest of the kitchen staff arrives for work or after they've left when their shifts are over.  I learned this from an IT Director who once told me "Never ask your employees to do something you wouldn't do yourself."  I think this philosophy works.  Only once have I ever had a kitchen employee try to kill me. 

In a large kitchen the Chef de Cuisine position falls right below the Executive Chef.  The Chef de Cuisine handles much of the administrative duties of the kitchen, menu development, vendor relations, and many operational functions.  Chef de Cuisine roughly translates to "Head Chef."  The Executive Chef may oversee multiple kitchens/locations.  The Chef de Cuisine oversees one location and reports to the Executive Chef.  He/she may or may not cook very much on a daily basis.

The Sous Chefs occupy the next rung of the ladder.  They are responsible for the daily food preparation and service.  You will typically find them in the kitchen almost all the time.  They report to the Chef de Cuisine.  

There are several more layers of the kitchen hierarchy, but these are the top levels.  You might wonder why there are so many people required to serve a restaurant menu.  It seems like a lot of people just to turn out some nice food and you would be right to wonder this.  The structure I described above is a traditional kitchen hierarchy.  In reality, most restaurants just have an Executive Chef, one or two Sous Chefs, and a bunch of line cooks.  Smaller places will just have a head cook and a few line cooks.  You don't need an Executive Chef to serve burgers and fried pork tenderloin sandwiches.

So back to "Yes Chef, No Chef."  In all my years in kitchens, until recently I had never heard kitchen employees say "Yes Chef" when speaking to each other in a real working kitchen except then they were addressing the Executive Chef or maybe a Sous Chef.  This was true in every kitchen I have worked in. From TGI Friday's all the way through to exclusive country clubs and Michelin-starred establishments.

I can only surmise that this phenomenon was manufactured by Food Network TV shows for entertainment purposes.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of younger culinarians who grew up watching Gordon Ramsay degrading everyone he meets or some kind of cooking competition packed with all kinds of drama and suspense around cooking a turnip in less than an hour.  The young people who watched those shows enter the foodservice industry thinking that it's just non-stop drama and excitement.  Now you hear "Yes Chef, No Chef" in professional kitchens.  Everyone thinks these TV shows are what working in a restaurant is really like and they go to culinary school expecting to dive head first into what they saw on TV once they graduate because they think that's what it will be like for them.

Let me tell you: It isn't.  It's fucking hard work and you have to work your ass off doing boring, unglamorous things for a long time in order to make just enough money to feed your family.  At the end of the day we don't sit around in a plush lounge drinking expensive wine and discussing our feelings.  It just doesn't happen that way.  I'll save the Food Network rant for another post, but by now you probably know how I feel about it.  Interesting entertainment, but it's caused a lot of people to embark on foodservice careers for the wrong reasons and ultimately fail at them.

So let's stop with the "Yes Chef, No Chef" for a minute and use our real names. And let's stop glamorizing something that really isn't that glamorous.  Ok?