Cook, chef, cooking teacher are different jobs.
Each of them has a peculiar aim: the cook cooks and often the cook is better than the chef at that; the chef is the orchestra director; the teacher must have the gift of generosity with giving his knowledge.
I haven’t mentioned waiter and you reader might wonder about the title.
The waiter has the thermometer of the situation in the dining room.
Many students work as waiters during the years of high school and then college.
Not all of them become chef. This is not, most of the times, their goal.
But, as I wrote before, the waiters understand what is going on in a dining room.
They know, for example, that they must keep the order of arrival of the clients: you cannot serve first a table that arrives second.
The waiters know that they must wait until everyone at the same table has finished to eat the first course – or main dish – before taking to everyone the second course or dessert. This part can be harder, as everybody eats at different speed (I was yesterday at a restaurant for brunch with my friend Sue: I ate in 15 minutes what she ate in 50). This “different speed” can cause small trouble in the service order of the tables: people arrived after can finish earlier.
The waiter must be able to bring the orders to the kitchen in the right…order. At the same table the guests can ask for the same dish, but each of them with one difference .
Honestly, I have to say that in my restaurant – I had been running for 12 years 1985 – 1997 – every day and every service was smooth in the kitchen and, as chef, I want to recognize myself the gift of maintaining calm (in the spirit) and speed (in the body action) at the same time, among all the workers in the kitchen.
But, I have still a bright memory of one night when a table of four ordered 4 mollusks soups: one without bread, one without garlic, one without tomato sauce and one without mussels. For some mysterious reason (maybe because the mollusks soup had only another additional ingredient, clams) that order messed up the kitchen that night.
I cannot forgive myself although one night in 12 years could be an acceptable mistake.
That night the waiters had instead to maintain the calm in the dining room.
About being a chef: participating to cooking show is not enough to be defined a chef. Neither it is to have attended a school and come out graduated. What follows now seems something pulled out from “old times sayings”, but it is true: hospitality and restoration are among the most ancient jobs of the history. To be a chef, who is the “manager” of a kitchen, you must know all the small activitities inside it. I personally started with folding napkins and, I swear, I was not older than four.
As, during the service, the task of the chef is to be timing and to give the exact commands with the right order to the cooks, now you can understand the big interaction between chef and waiter (or maître, in the large and formal restaurants).
The chef must know the stress occurring in the dining room, without getting mad at the waiters. He has also to show up in the dining room, occasionally, to calm down the guests with a smile and, if it is the case, to make excuses and apologies. This must be done with what we define “garbo”, that is grace and courtesy, without overpass the job of the waiter making him/her to appear unable and inconclusive.
For sure the chef has not be a saint ( who is?), but this figure must have the calm and the sense organization that can be developed only with the experience of several years in kitchenS ( plural kitchens), preferably covering different positions: the chef must know ingredients, rotations of the supplies, the right way to preserve foods, the cooking techniques (how could he/she possibly give commands in the right order otherwise?), must be able to interact with everybody in the dining room ( this is a teaching by the carver Bartolomeo Scappi well described in his opera back in 1570).
In a few words: the chef must have a certain aptitude: something that very hardly can be taught at school.