The Chef's Ladder
- Chef de Cuisine
- This is the
apex, the chef whose initials are etched into the silver flatware, and
embroidered onto the washroom towels. This chef has the vision,
conceives the dishes, imbues the whole restaurant with his/her
personality. This would be the person who appears on television.
Sometimes, if need be, chefs de cuisine even cook.
- Executive Chef
-
This is a nebulous title, as only the biggest, most famous chefs de cuisine follow themselves
with executive chefs. Executive chefs run the whole kitchen when
the big boss isn't around and are often employed when a chef has
more than one restaurant. They hire and fire the staff,
determine costs, revamp the menu, take care of all administrative
tasks, interact with the dining room managers, and generally
oversee the well-being of the restaurant. In smaller, less
flamboyant restaurants, the Chef de Cuisine sees to all this, and
an executive chef would be redundant.
- Sous-Chef
- Next
under the Chef de Cuisine or Executive Chef, depending on the restaurant,
this chef is always in the kitchen. He/she comes up with the daily
specials, takes inventory, watches over the staff, expedites (see Expediter,
below), and basically does all the hands-on work. There are sous-chefs of two ilks: those who will soon move on to open their own
restaurants, becoming Chefs de Cuisine, and those who will remain
as they are, preferring the rhythmic rigors of the kitchen to the
bright lights of chef
stardom.
- Expediter
-
Generally the sous-chef, the expediter serves as the liaison between the
customers in the dining room and the line cooks. He/she makes sure that the
food gets to the wait staff in a timely fashion, so that everyone
sitting at a particular table is served simultaneously. This job is all
about coordination and timing.
- Pastry
Chef
- The pastry chef is like
the sous-chef, but reigns over the pastry section, which is usually
tucked far away from the heat and bustle of the main kitchen (to protect
delicate soufflés, fragile spun sugar, and temperamental
chocolates). The pastry section has always been assigned less
status than the main kitchen -- possibly because pastry was a
traditionally female province (if there were any women in the
kitchen at all, you might find them in the pastry section).
Fortunately, this is changing.
- Line Cooks
- The
line cooks are the people who actually cook your food. They are divided up, either by cooking
technique (saute, grill, etc.), or by type of food (fish, meat,
etc.). When the expeditor shouts out an order (they always
shout), the line cooks jump to prepare it. Most cooks work up
through the line (working every position), before being promoted
to sous-chef.
- Chef de garde-manger
- The person in
the garde manger section -- also known as the cold station -- plates all
the dishes that do not require heat, such as salads, terrines,
and sometimes desserts, if there is no assigned pastry person on
the line.
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