When Does “Cook to Chef” Happen? (And What Comes After?) | A Cook to Chef to Entrepreneur Model
Listen to the accompanying podcast of this blog post here.
Three definitions. Two qualifiers each. One model I've been refining for the industry.
TL;DR
A cook works with food.
A chef works with food and owns responsibility.
An entrepreneur has responsibilities that go beyond food and receives asymmetric upside.
Cook to chef happens fast. Faster than the industry wants to admit. Chef to entrepreneur illuminates gaps and presents opportunities to develop new skills. Everything below is the argument.
From prep tables to comments sections - the question that starts fights
Ask "when do you go from cook to chef?" within earshot of any opinionated industry professional and you're guaranteed a reaction. Sometimes curious. More often firmly held, potentially outraged, and traceable to something one chef told them back in 2007.
I'm guilty here too, your honor. Seven years ago I made a podcast episode on this exact topic because I was frustrated trying to apply everyone else's definitions to the work I do helping chefs perform better. My working definition back then: a chef is someone who cooks and gets paid in a professional context.
I still stand behind most of what I shared in that episode. But the rebuttal was easy, and people took the shot:
"Okay Justin, I'm cooking at McDonald's and getting paid. Call me a chef."
Fair. I hadn't defined cook at all. Definitely my bad. So here's the updated model.
Cook: you work with food
Prep cook, fry cook, line cook. You are a cook if you work with food. Preparing food, cooking food, plating food, developing food, the list goes on. You might get paid. You might not (enter, internships and externships). It might be a small independent restaurant, a chain/franchise, a two-Michelin-star tasting menu spot, a private boat, or a senior care facility. The setting doesn't change the definition.
One note: there are jobs in a kitchen that come before cook. Dishwasher is the obvious one. Nearly all of us have done it, and it's a critical part of the day-to-day, but in this model it sits just before "cook". Once that dishwasher is in a role where they're preparing food, cooking food, plating food, developing food, or handling food, I feel comfortable arguing that they are (even for just a part of their day) a cook.
Chef: you work with food and own responsibility
You are a chef the moment the equation becomes food + responsibility. This tends to ruffle some feathers, but I believe it to be the most consistent definition that applies in the ways that we care about.
I laid this out with my friend Chris Spear on his podcast two years ago, and it's the version that has been sturdiest and been most useful. To make the leap from cook to chef, it often means taking the work you're doing with food and adding some combination of ownership, accountability and care.
Responsibility for:
the product
other people
the numbers
not cross-contaminating and sending a guest to the hospital
walking a plate to table 12 and explaining the third course to a couple on a date.
what needs to be ordered for tomorrow
…the list continues, and I'm sure you can bring to mind responsibilities you have at work that you shoulder as a chef.
The McDonald's problem, revisited
Let's stay on the fast-food example, because I got dunked on with it and it actually proves the point. Say you're working with food at McDonald's and you feel the pull of responsibility. Two potential outcomes are probably likely:
Path one: you notice you like this whole responsibility thing. You want to manage people, run operations, talk to customers. With this definition, you've stopped working with food, and so you shed the "cook" title and find yourself with some version of shift lead, to assistant manager, to restaurant manager inside of McDonald's. Chipotle, Jimmy John's, Taco Bell, same ladder.
Path two: you get that glimmer of chef life when you realize, "I want to sear this patty a little bit longer for more Maillard reaction" or "I want to put less mustard here" or "I want to add in an extra pickle slice", it's actually not allowed. What I didn't give enough credit to before: these companies have masterfully neutered and blunted decision-making with operational infrastructure. That's why a Quarter Pounder in Seattle and one in Milwaukee aim to be identical.
Unfortunately in that moment, the energy and ambition has nowhere to go. So instead of getting promoted internally, you end up applying at a restaurant, a caterer, or a private chef doing events. You go somewhere where you can become a chef.
In many contexts, cooks lack responsibility because the environment withholds or removes it.
My contrarian take: for most, cook to chef happens fast.
It's been brought to my attention that the timing of this transition doesn't align with people's expectations.
"Justin, I've been cooking for four months. Based on how I show up at work, I'm working with food and owning responsibility. Are you saying I'm a chef?"
Absolutely. Emphatically, yes. See: the thing I said publicly in 2019 (it went reasonably viral and I got some hate for it), and I'll say it again.
You did not skip being a cook. During your first day, first week, first three months, you were trained, you shadowed, you were onboarded, and nobody expected you to make decisions. You were a cook then. If something went wrong, sure, maybe you got yelled at, but the person training you was probably reprimanded worse.
This was drilled into me in Thomas Keller's kitchens, as both an unpaid extern at Per Se and later as a chef de partie at The French Laundry. The expectation, from Chef Keller down through anyone in leadership, was that you run your station like it's your own little microcosm of a restaurant. You track your prep. You manage allergies. You propose plating layouts. You taste your own purées. You have your orders ready to submit for tomorrow. You delegate prep tasks to the commis team.
Is that the same as running a restaurant? No. Does it let the menu change daily, allow for highly technical execution, and produce people who leave those kitchens as very capable chefs? Also yes. None of this is my idea. I'm just trying to tie "be the chef of your station" into what do I actually do differently tomorrow?
Cook to chef happens fast. Then, you spend years learning, failing, iterating, and building your repertoire as a chef. And when you take that to market or apply for your next opportunity, 9.9 times out of 10, the market wants a chef.
The restaurant you're applying to
The client you're trying to close
The cookbook you're pitching
The guests you hope will show up to your pop-up
The chef you want to be mentored by
They want to work with a chef. They want you to be a chef. "I'm just a cook" is not serving you.
Responsibility-maxxing
Since this trendy new language is now available to us, it's getting added to model. The test I suggested seven years ago you might try: call yourself a chef and see how it feels.
For some, that permission is all they needed. Go look at the comments from that episode. For others, saying it out loud exposes a gap, and that's arguably more useful. It shines a light on the responsibility they're avoiding. The behaviors a "chef" wouldn't do.
Yes, I frame cook-vs-chef as binary. But once you qualify, you're on a continuum. You can be a chef who has responsibilities and doesn't follow through. A chef who makes excuses, has no growth mindset, or backstabs. There are levels to this. You can picture the great chefs and the not-so-great chefs you've worked with, and both are still chefs by this definition.
The pushbacks with cook to chef (rapid fire)
I can already hear people typing. Let's take these one by one:
"Staying a cook keeps you humble." The fear is that "chef" turns you into a tyrant, a wannabe celebrity, the diva in starched whites who won't mop after service. What you can do instead: call yourself a chef, take every benefit of the title, and simply be the kind of chef who doesn't do any of those things. I want you to win.
"A cook knows how, a chef knows why." The classic line that fits on a fortune cookie and comes up in not just my comments section, but others on Reddit and Instagram in the hopes of "ending the argument". To steelman this view: a cook follows instructions, a chef has the interconnected web of why the sauce isn't emulsifying, why waste here hits food cost, the strategy behind why we do it this way.
My response: wouldn't it be better to have an entire kitchen that knows how and why? And isn't that how good kitchens already operate? At the height of elBulli, Ferran Adrià would point to the unpaid stages making yuba skins, one of the trickiest prep projects on the prep list, and say those are the experts, I leave it to them. Try it yourself: ask a "cook" a few why-questions about their station. They already know a lot. So if we agree that your "cooks" know both how and why, I guess there are more chefs than we thought?
"Chef means chief. There can only be one." This model doesn't break when you add a prefix or suffix to someone's title. Org charts are immensely helpful in a team. I'm the chef of the garde manger station here. I benefitted a ton from being called a chef de partie. Have a chef de cuisine and put a head chef or executive chef above them. Those are just levers and dials on what food you're working with and what responsibilities you hold. Because remember, a chef is someone who works with food and owns responsibility.
I'd love to dust my hands off and say that's the transition, you've become a chef, but unfortunately, I've had to recently bring attention to a second transition. Every week on Repertoire Report episodes of the podcast, we inevitably cover chefs blowing up over financial mismanagement, HR disasters, food safety, branding, social media, tech, partnerships. One might look around and ask: why does this keep happening?
Entrepreneur: responsibility beyond food, plus asymmetric upside
This gets personal for me. After my time in restaurants, I started hosting pop-ups, which was my first real crack at running my own thing. I didn't have language for it then, but it was my first time going from chef to entrepreneur. What I've learned is that chef to entrepreneur looks a lot more like cook to chef than you might think. Which means you already know how to do it.
Fair warning: this is my current working definition. My chef definition broke in certain contexts and thus, got updated. This one might too. Poke holes, send me feedback, I invite your thoughts.
An entrepreneur has two qualifiers:
Responsibilities that go beyond just food.
A recipient of asymmetric upside.
Qualifier one: beyond food
I was a sous chef at Lysverket on the west coast of Norway. After being promoted from the hardest station, started as AM sous running apprentices, butchery, and the prep list for the dinner CDPs, and eventually developed dishes for the tasting menu and ran expo on the pass every night. I had a lot of responsibility, and nearly every one could be connected via a straight line to the food. But that's not where a fine dining restaurant's responsibilities end.
Marketing → more reservations → more revenue. Purveyor relationships → better pricing and access → better margins. Recruiting → better hires → better retention → less money spent recruiting, interviewing, and training
Sure, food can be connected to those - it's a restaurant after all - but it requires a few more lines. The word beyond in this entrepreneur definition is doing the heavy lifting for the contexts that matter to us in the industry:
It's less about how bangin' the flavor combination is and more about the margin on the dish
You don't stop thinking about presentation aesthetics completely, but you start factoring in how hot apps is going to plate 65 of these a night
Suddenly the website matters because you've noticed how it affects your brand
I've found this to be simultaneously the biggest frustration and the biggest opportunity of this shift. It feels like a step backward. You can crush a station, butcher better than most, have consistent technique, and I really hope you're proud of those things - I certainly am when I identify that in myself. But the moment I went beyond food, I was suddenly aware and self conscious of these gaps.
Here's what's helped the most in coaching sessions with you folks: do what you did when you went from cook to chef.
Marketing, financials, tech, operations, negotiation, recruiting, strategy. Each of these has skills you can improve. Unless you're a rare savant, you weren't an expert at anything you're proud of on day one. You ventured in (or it got thrust on you), you were shaky, you made an embarrassing mistake or two, and then you got better: research, experimentation, mentorship, reps (hashtag MoreReps).
What's worked for me, and I need the reminder too: beginner's mind. I'm not great at this yet. At best, I can improve it, identify the skills, measure my performance, and find ways to get better. And at the very least, because my responsibilities now go beyond food, I can hire for it or delegate it. At the risk of point out another potential painful reality: delegation (as a skill) might be a gap too - meta, huh?
Qualifier two: asymmetric upside
For a lot of us this is a big part of why we make the jump. In business, it shows up in al sorts of ways:
Enterprise value
Valuation multiples
Equity
Ownership arrangements
Articles of incorporation that give you a seat at the table
My point is that this kind of upside is usually missing from an hourly or salaried roles. If you run a culinary program as a chef de cuisine and the restaurant has a great quarter, you'll hopefully get a bonus, but that reward is relatively linear. Compare that to the entrepreneur who adds $600,000 of repeatable EBITDA. At a modest 4x multiple, they just increased the value of the business by over $2 million. That's asymmetric upside.
Now, I'd be doing you a disservice if I pretended this shiny asymmetric upside was guaranteed. There's risk, and usually the more risk you take on, the more asymmetric the upside. If you found a business with no proven success, and you might own 100% of it, but that's not worth anything on day. one. If you join an established company as a partner, and you might get 18% of the company which vests over three years. Yes, you're getting upside, but less of it, because you showed up after some risk was already absorbed.
Why both qualifiers are required
Example 1: Beyond food, but no upside. Let's say you're Head of Operations. You manage the recipe catalog with the CDC, run purveyor relationships, do inventory, sit in on interviews. You're clearly beyond food. But you're salaried with a performance bonus. By this definition, not an entrepreneur. No shade. But notice what changes when the upside is present: different priorities, more robust systems and assets, a longer time horizon, fewer short-term moves.
Example 2: Upside, but no responsibility. You own a piece of the business but hold no responsibilities in it, food or otherwise. An example might be an investor. Investors can be great, and often necessary. But in this business, that person isn't an entrepreneur. (They might be in another project in their life.)
Useful, not true
Someone is typing a long disagreement right now, so let me get ahead of it with help from Derek Sivers' book Useful, Not True.
For someone like me, prone to thinking to the point of overthinking, Sivers' shares a myriad of insights that I stand on here which plague us as humans: competing priorities, preferences, uncertainty, and differing interpretations mean that most of our models aren't "true" in any strict sense. Add Greg Northcraft's definition of an expert, which I first heard on Tim Ferriss's podcast: an expert is someone with a predictable model that works.
Fuse those, and here's the bar I'm holding this to: I want this model to be predictable and useful for you, even if, pressed to the limits of vocabulary and stacked against everyone else's definitions, it isn't "true."
It pains me to say this, because I've benefited greatly from their content, but some of the other definitions of entrepreneur aren't useful to me (and I'd argue us, as an industry):
David Senra, one of the goats of modern podcasting, simplifies and translates the French "one who undertakes" into "someone who has ideas and does them." Beautiful. But as a sous chef I had ideas for tasting menu dishes, developed them, and served them to guests. I would not have called myself an entrepreneur then.
Michael Gerber, in The E-Myth Revisited (one of the most impactful books I've read as a business owner), writes that "the entrepreneur isn't the person who does the work but the one who conceives of the work to be done". It pains me to disagree, because I love the takeaway: don't be the cornerstone that collapses the business when you're removed. But on day one, most founders do a lot of the work. Multiple hats. Parts of it are true. The definition isn't useful. So iterate.
Notice too, that in both the chef and entrepreneur definitions, there's room for multiple of them. I don't talk about being the chef or the entrepreneur as if they're this monolith at the top - in many great organizations operating today, I believe they benefit from multiple entrepreneurs on the team.
Although I've tailored this model to apply to the hospitality industry (and chefs specifically), I believe you can replace "food" with whatever the main product in another industry is and it would still apply. It allows for flexibility in what your work will be once you become an entrepreneur:
Want to have a robust leadership team where you aren't required for day to day operations? Build it!
Want to be behind the pass every night plating but still manage other business aspects before service? Let's go!
Want to go public via an IPO? Want to stay a small, single-location spot? Both are possible!
Founder, owner, partner, freelancer
These other titles or identities get thrown in here, and I'm not opposed to them. If anything, I follow the "every square is a rectangle; not every rectangle is a square" analogy. Entrepreneur is the four-sided geometric shape. Founder, owner, partner, freelancer are the more specific shapes, and you can adopt whichever is useful or accurate for your situation.
Two adjacent mental models worth your time: Seth Godin on how freelancers differ from entrepreneurs, and Balaji Srinivasan on founders versus inheritors. The former might apply if you're an independent recipe developers, private chef (who has some opportunity to grow/expand - I would consider most private chefs to be entrepreneurs), and consultants. The second covers an edge case a lot of you can picture: the chef who's been at a restaurant twelve years and gets handed the keys by the owners. Neither uses my definition. Both might be useful.
What this actually changes
I can speak personally from making this shift: it changed my goals. It recalibrates your priorities. It raises (or removes entirely) the ceiling you've been bumping against. It even changes your content diet. The ratio of cookbooks to business books on my office shelves has slowly flipped over time, and that's a direct response to noticing skills I lacked and going to find out what others had already figured out. Books, founder interviews, blogs, investors on X.
If you're still timid, or "entrepreneur" feels cringe, or you aren't there yet, try softer language: I'm becoming more entrepreneurial in my role.I'm exploring entrepreneurial principles at work.
And to be clear: you are not lesser-than as a cook, and you are not "not enough" if your career never ventures into entrepreneurship. This is a framework I come back to on coaching calls because it helps people in transition who are feeling imposter syndrome and frustration with new responsibilities. That's the aim. I want this to help you. I want you to win.
The model, one more time
Cook to chef is fast. Chef to entrepreneur is the move beyond chef that I want us as an industry to talk about more. Call yourself the thing, find the gap(s) it exposes, and build your skillset to improve.
If the insight isn't enough and you want to work through a transition together, whether that's doubling the profit in your business, launching your first thing from zero to one, or building the systems that unlock you as the key person, apply for coaching. It's a three-month, outcome-driven approach mapped directly to your goals. A fun stat: our clients recently crossed $1M in increased business tied to the work we've done together, which is mostly a kudos to their follow-through, and a small pat on our back.
Referenced in this post:
The original 2019 episode on cook vs. chef (link)
Chris Spear's podcast conversation (link)
Repertoire's series on skill development and reps (link)
Useful, Not True by Derek Sivers (link)
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber (link)
Seth Godin on freelancers vs. entrepreneurs (link)
Balaji Srinivasan on founders vs. inheritors (link)
Apply for coaching: (link)