Home "Chef"

There’s a couple of terms in today’s food culture that drive me bananas. The first is “foodie”. Having met lots of diners who consider themselves “foodies”, the term conjures an image of wealthy people who couldn’t hack it as a cook or a waiter, but love to eat out and rip apart food and service as though they are experts. I hate this term, and refuse to use it unless applying it to the aforementioned group of dreaded customers. “Food People” love food. “Foodies” love hating restaurants.

The second is “home chef”.

I first started hearing this ad nauseam while working for a gourmet specialty foods company in the “foodie” mecca of Haddonfield, New Jersey. (Ironically, Haddonfield is a real desert when it comes to delicious food. Exceptions: Da Soli and Fuji on Kings Highway, and the tiny Mediterranean Café on Haddon Avenue.) More and more often customers were walking into the shop talking about how their husband or wife was a great “home chef”. And the more they mentioned it, the more it sounded to me like nails on a chalkboard.

Brace yourselves because I’m about to rain on a lot of parades right now: there is no such thing as a “home chef”. I’ve heard this point argued by professional chefs before, once to such an obnoxious degree that I’m surprised anyone will still eat the man’s food. I’m not going to attack it quite like that. I am going to put my rubber-clogged foot down, however, and adamantly dispel the notion that someone can be a “home chef”.

Now there are plenty of good cooks out there. With the popularity of The Food Network and the ever-growing library of celebrity chef cookbooks, it’s damn near impossible for a “Food Person” to be a bad cook. But being a good cook, or even a terrific cook does not make you a Chef. Does doing a good bandage job make you a “home doctor”? I think not. The average sous chef – and that’s the person who’s second in command, not even the person who’s in charge of it all – has ten years experience as a grunt person. A person who pays their dues chopping vegetables, portioning meat, assembling salads, plating desserts, and doing all the uninteresting mundane things that make up an entry level position – and doing them for $8 an hour. That person deserves the title of Chef. Someone who successfully made a Julia Child recipe one time at home does not.

Being a Chef is not just about creating food. It’s about walking into your otherwise pristine kitchen first thing in the morning and finding the sewer backed up onto the line, knowing you have a restaurant to open in two hours. It’s about popping out three hundred brunch covers with just three cooks the day of the New York Marathon. It’s about standing over a four foot grill in a basement kitchen when it’s 100 degrees (outside) because your grill cook is on a bender and didn’t show up for work. Being a chef is part plumber, electrician, parole officer, mentor, accountant, salesman, and boss – and then part food. It’s about managing a team you trust implicitly to do as you ask, and do it over and over and over exactly the way you taught them. It’s about teaching a teenage dishwasher how to properly hold a knife and make a perfect hollandaise and craft them into a brand new cook before your very eyes. Being a Chef is about hard work and long hours and ruined relationships. It’s about sacrifice. And until you pay with burn marks on your forearms from pulling croutons, and a scar where you put an oyster knife through your hand, and countless other injuries…you can’t call yourself a Chef.