8 Skills That Make You A Chef (or Just About Any Other Biz Leader)

I’ve always had difficulty explaining to friends and family the way in which a smooth, well run kitchen actually operates — there’s a lot of moving parts, and it’s a thing of beauty to watch your team power through a weekend night in such organized chaos. From a distance, I suppose the average restaurant kitchen looks like a bunch of folks doing the same exact thing, almost like an assembly line, but if you actually pay attention, you see that everything is pieced together a certain way for a reason.

You have to be able to cook your ass off to be a chef, but just because you can doesn’t mean that you are one. Like most starting out, I was pretty average when I started working in the kitchen, and over time I got better to the point where I got to be pretty good, and now I’d call myself a great cook… and a chef. Notice, how becoming a chef doesn’t graduate you from being a cook, instead, it compliments it and is part of the repertoire.

So, the real question is — how does a great cook become a chef?

I think a chef is someone who can cook their face off, while at the same time, having the ability to manage, lead and create a successful kitchen operation — restaurant or otherwise. One of the main problems is that the hands-on, technical part of the job, which most of us enjoy most, requires a drastically different skill set than the other essential components of the job. So, yes, there are obvious hands-on…