Yes, Chef.

Lately, it feels like everyone with black latex gloves, a tripod, a rockstar attitude, and a set of Japanese knives calls themselves chef.

There are articles everywhere about the fall of the chef. The burnout, the culture, the quiet unravelling of kitchens as we knew them. There are think pieces everywhere. Anthony Bourdain comes up. Rene Redzepi comes up. The whole thing is being pulled apart in public.

And like anyone who has worked in a kitchen, who has had insults hurled at their head while dodging copper skillets, I have thoughts.

Because the truth is, the dark side of this industry was never hidden. It was just normalized.

Fine dining, casual dining, cafés, bakeries. It doesn’t really matter. The system holds. It runs on the backs of people who are called “unskilled labour.” Unskilled. People who can break down a whole animal in minutes, cleanly, without waste, who can run a station in three languages, switching mid-service without thinking, who can feel a piece of fish with their hands and know, without looking, if it’s ready. The ones who close, scrub, reset, and are back the next morning before the first delivery hits the door.

It runs on immigrants, on people who don’t always have the language, or the papers, or the margin to say no. On people who take the shifts no one else wants, who absorb the pressure, who stay quiet because they have to.

And then there is the culture that sits on top of it. The shouting, the hierarchy, the way respect is withheld until it isn’t.

I remember cooking for Anthony Bourdain. I remember wanting, just for a second, for him to be gentler than the stories. He wasn’t. He was exacting, clear, unimpressed in a way that landed quickly and stayed. I hadn’t worked the ranks the way he believed mattered, and he made that known in a few short words that stripped everything back. It didn’t feel unfair, but it didn’t feel good either.

Chef is a title you earn. Not by buying the knives, not by plating something pretty, not by posting it online. You earn it in the hierarchy, in the repetition, in the long, unglamorous stretch of time where someone else decides if you are ready. The kitchen is militaristic for a reason. Brigade, rank, call and response. It comes from somewhere older than any of us. Guilds, systems, lineage. It is not soft.

My first chef used to tell us that service was like going to war. I’ve never been to war. He had been in the French military. But if war is dodging projectiles, cold sweats, and learning to flinch before anything even lands, then I understood.

I stepped away from it.

For two decades, I stayed adjacent. Close enough to feel the heat, far enough to choose something else. I came back in fragments, as a solo baker in Montreal’s first third wave coffee shop, as a menu consultant in a few excellent kitchens. Then I went academic with food history.

And eventually, I came back fully, but not in the way the system respects.

Private chef.

There is a particular look chefs give you when you say that. A pause that is just a fraction too long, a recalibration. Like you took something with you when you left, like you didn’t stay long enough to be marked by it properly. No brigade, no line, no one to answer to and no one answering back. Just you, your food, and the quiet fact that if it fails, it fails with your name on it.

I understood it. I had stepped outside the structure that gives the title its weight, so I didn’t use it.

And in the middle of all of this, I find myself building something new, slowly, quietly, piece by piece. A different kind of kitchen, one without a brigade, without the constant pressure of someone else’s pass, one where the rhythm is mine, for better or worse.

At the same time, I watch my baby brother. He has been in Paris since 2019, still inside it. Michelin-nominated, having turned down the star, choosing the work instead. The brigade, the hours, the repetition, the version of the kitchen that stays in your body.

I am deeply proud of him, in that way that feels almost physical.

And when he talks about what I do, there is something else there. Not overt, not unkind, just a slight shift in tone, a soft edge of condescension. Like he doesn’t quite know where to place me, like I exist just outside the system that taught him what this all means.

I don’t think he’s wrong.

On Monday, I was at my butcher placing orders, walking through the meat locker, calling out cuts, pointing to sides taller than me. His new assistant followed along, a little unsure, trying to keep up. “Yes, Chef.”

I stopped. I looked for the sarcasm first. Always. That reflex doesn’t leave you. The quiet inventory of whether you’ve earned something, or if it’s being handed to you too easily.

There was none. Just respect.

Recently, I did a guest spot in a Michelin-nominated kitchen, a real one, the kind you don’t pretend your way into. My first chef, the one I worked under years ago in France, was in town and asked if I wanted to join the line that night.

He introduced me to his team. “Regina, c’est mon bras droit ce soir.”

A chorus back. “Oui, Chef.”

And then he asked me to run the menu breakdown, to set the tone for the night, to place everyone where they needed to be.

And so when my first chef closed the night, the kitchen scrubbed, the team sharing a bottle, he raised a glass to me.

“Bon travail, Chef.”

And still, it didn’t feel loud or triumphant.

Just… steady.