A chef is a person who cooks professionally. In a professional kitchen setting, the term is used only for the one person in charge of everyone else in the kitchen, the executive chef.

Word history

"Chef" (from Latin caput) is the abbreviated form of the French phrase chef de cuisine, the "chief" or "head" of a kitchen. The title chef in the culinary profession originates from the roots of haute cuisine in the 19th century. The English use of the word chef has become a term that is sometimes used to mean any professional cook, regardless of rank.

Various chef titles

Below are various titles given to those working in a professional kitchen and each can be considered a title for a type of chef. Many of the titles are based on the brigade system (Brigade de cuisine), documented by Georges Auguste Escoffier, while others have a more general meaning depending on the individual kitchen. Not all restaurants will use these titles as each establishment may have its own set guidelines to organization. Specialized and hierarchal chef titles are usually found only in fine-dining, upscale restaurants; kitchen staff members at casual restaurants such as diners are more often called "cook" or "short-order cook".

Executive Chef (Chef de Cuisine) (Head Chef)

The person in charge of all things related to the kitchen usually including menu creation, management, scheduling, and payroll of entire kitchen staff, ordering, and plating design. Chef de Cuisine is the traditional French term from which the English word chef comes, and is more common in European kitchens. Executive Chef is more common in the U.S. and England. Head Chef is often used to designate someone with the same duties as an executive chef, but there is usually someone in charge of them, possibly making the larger executive decisions such as direction of menu, final authority in staff management decisions, etc. This is often the case for chefs with several restaurants.

Sous chef

The sous-chef de cuisine (under-chef of the kitchen) is the direct assistant of the executive chef and is second in command. They may be responsible for scheduling, and filling in when the executive chef is off-duty. The Sous Chef will also fill in for, or assist the chef de partie (line cook) when needed. Smaller operations may not have a sous chef, while larger operations may have multiple.McBride, 8.

Expediter (Aboyeur)

The expediter takes the orders from the dining room and relays them to the stations in the kitchen. This person also often puts the finishing touches on the dish before it goes to the dining room. In some operations this task may be done by either the executive chef or the sous chef.McBride, 9.

Chef de Partie

A chef de partie, also known as a "station chef" or "line cook", is in charge of a particular area of production. In large kitchens, each station chef might have several cooks and/or assistants. In most kitchens however, the station chef is the only worker in that department. Line cooks are often divided into a hierarchy of their own, starting with "First Cook", then "Second Cook", and so on as needed.