My New Orleans
Chef Gerard Maras posted a quote from Alton Brown on Facebook recently: “Very good cooks who are employed as ‘chefs’ rarely refer to themselves as ‘chefs.’ The refer to themselves as ‘cooks.’”
It made me think about the definition of a “chef,” and how that definition has changed over the last few decades.
When I was a younger man, my then-wife and I had dinner for my birthday at a restaurant called Chanterelle in New York. When someone came to ask whether we had any questions about the menu (and I’m digressing, but it was a wonderful restaurant and I framed the two menus I still have from the place, because they had artists design them and they were hand-written) and my then-wife, who is a lovely person and thought she was complimenting me because she knew how much I loved to cook, said that I was a chef.