Chef Chef Chefitty Chef Chef Chef

So, as I keep telling you all, I’m a former chef. I guess that’s not really 100% true, though. I mean, I’m certainly not working in a professional kitchen right now, though very few of us are. Right now, I’m sitting on the couch writing this, my legs under a blanket, while my fiancée does important work on her COVID-19 rapid response team and I wonder in the back of my mind when my EI benefits will kick in. Up until this point I was still working in a real kitchen, but I felt I was reaching the end of my tenure in pro cooking anyways and was beginning to make the jump from cook to writer when the whole virus thing happened. So, with all this time, I decided to start a blog, to kind of hone my writing and give poor Liz some room to work without me always clamouring for her attention.

So, is one a chef even if they’re not really a chef anymore? What even IS a chef? It’s not the chubby dude in the whites and the floppy hat, like in Ratatouille, not anymore. But thanks to Food Network and ‘chef culture’ what does the word, the title mean anymore? Does it mean anything when home cooks go on competitive cooking shows and are referred to as home chefs? When every single member of every single kitchen team is referred to as one of the chefs?

Chef doesn’t mean angry man who cooks and yells, all it really means is boss, chief, jefe. The chef is the boss of the kitchen, the leader of the pack. What chef says goes, and there’s a reason for that, presumably a good one if the chef is a good chef. So, it kinda grinds my gears to hear people refer to themselves as chefs when they’re not. They’re cooks, and there’s not a damn thing wrong with that.

Being a cook means you’re doing the work, cooking the food and that’s good work to do. I was a very cheffy chef for a while in a grand hotel, and lemme tell you, I didn’t get to do very much of that work at all. It was mostly inventory, e-mails, cost sheets and frantically phoning people based on seniority to cover shifts when one or more of my unionized cooks decided they weren’t showing up for their breakfast shift.

So, sometimes, a chef isn’t really a chef, but once you are a chef are you ever not? I mean, was Anthony Bourdain (rest his soul) still a chef? Is Gordon Ramsay still a chef? I mean, probably. I wouldn’t want to go up against Gordon Ramsay in a cooking competition. He still has the skills. And although I don’t really consider myself one anymore, I still technically work in a restaurant, I could still lead a kitchen and design a menu if I had to and I still cook like you’d hope a chef would.

I guess what I’m trying to say in this ramble is: don’t be taken in just because someone calls themselves a chef. I personally really like people who refer to themselves as cooks. And if there’s one other takeaway from this it’s that after four days of quarantine, I’m getting bored.