Does any restaurant, anywhere actually staff all the different chef positions?

Cafe Society
1

Is there any restaurant, anywhere so exalted it actually has individual chefs on board for all these positions?

See chef wiki

Sauté chef/ saucier
Responsible for all sautéed items and their sauce. This is usually the highest stratified position of all the stations.

Fish chef/poissonnier
Prepares fish dishes and often does all fish butchering as well as appropriate sauces. This station may be combined with the saucier position.

Roast chef/rôtisseur
Prepares roasted and braised meats and their appropriate sauce.

Grill chef / grillardin
Prepares all grilled foods; this position may be combined with the rotisseur.

Fry chef/friturier
Prepares all fried items; this position may be combined with the rotisseur position.

Vegetable chef/entremetier
Prepares hot appetizers and often prepares the soups, vegetables, pastas and starches. In a full brigade system a potager would prepare soups and a legumier would prepare vegetables.

Roundsman/tournant
Also referred to as a swing cook, fills in as needed on stations in the kitchen.

Pantry chef /garde manger
Responsible for preparing cold foods, including salads, cold appetizers, pâtés and other charcuterie items.

Butcher/ boucher
Butchers meats, poultry and sometimes fish. May also be responsible for breading meats and fish.

Pastry chef/ pâtissier
Is qualified in making baked goods such as pastries, cakes, biscuits, macarons, chocolates, breads and desserts. Pastry Chefs can specialize in cakes in patisseries or bakeries by making wedding, cupcakes, birthday and special occasion cakes. In larger establishments, the pastry chef often supervises a separate team in their own kitchen or separate shop.

2

Yes.

Typically only higher-end and/or higher-volume restaurants, but yes. And that list isn’t even complete – for example, Chef de Cuisine and Executive Chef aren’t listed. Also some restaurants have a separate bread baker, and there are of course prep positions where the staff has to be very skilled but don’t actually cook on the line during service. In some cases jobs might be combined/split. For example, The Boyfriend is a chef and he is currently a saute chef and there is no separate saucier, but has been saucier at another (famous) restaurant where there was a separate saute chef. As saucier he was primary under the Chef de Cuisine, as he is in the combined saute/saucier position now.

Take a look at this episode of Avec Eric where Eric Ripert goes through the positions in his restaurant’s kitchen. Also, check out any of the books that discuss Thomas Keller’s kitchens (i.e., French Laundry), or Anthony Bordain’s first book, Kitchen Confidential.

3

Thanks for information!

4

I worked at a fairly nice <but still not very expensive> seafood/steak restaurant as the pantry chef. Also backed a little for the bartender regarding food prep such as opening oysters, and helped the kitchen prep as well. Didn’t make much, but it was fun and I learned a lot. Also can shuck oysters like nobody’s business, and only gouged myself a couple times in the process. USE YOUR MITT!! :stuck_out_tongue:

5

I think, as Claire mentioned, it’s going to depend a lot on volume and how high end the establishment is. ISTM, you’d have to be turning over A LOT of meals on each night to need 10 chefs (plus the Chef and Sous-Chef). The places I’ve been to seem to have a Chef, maybe a Sous-Chef and the rest of the work is done by cooks who may have gone to culinary school or may have just been learned on the job. Some may be given titles such as Pantry Chef, Grill Chef or Pastry Chef, but it’s little more then a name for the position since they’re likely working under the head chef and not bringing anything of their own to the restaurant.

I do know of at least one restaurant that ages their own beef and presumable has their own butcher since I doubt the Chef or GM has time to deal with all that goes into that.

6

And one restaurant I know of here does their own butchery/charcuterie – i.e, they get in entire pigs – and the owner/exec chef does most of it.

Also, as a side note, the restaurant where The Boyfriend works is high-end, white tablecloth, but only does 70 - 100 covers a night, and they have a grill chef separate from what he does. I don’t know the whole kitchen structure, but I also know they don’t have a lot of prep help – the chefs themselves do a lot of mundane tasks like vegetable washing. In large hotel kitchens, otoh, you might have someone whose sole task is chopping onions. (I once took a cooking class from a chef whose first job out of culinary school had been just that.)

So yeah, it just varies a lot, depending on the particular restaurant’s size, volume, type of food, skills of the people who work there, etc.

7

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Experience helped make my rule 40 years ago: No restaurants. No retail.

8

The positions apply differently to each kitchen. In one place I worked at, the garde manger was a single cook. In another, it was a department of about 6 cooks, and they had their own walk-in and one-fourth of the kitchen. That place also had a dedicated butcher, and I was the saucier.

Every restaurant is going to morph the escoffier brigade system to match their business model and menu.

9

I used to be the pantry chef for my cousin’s fancy restaurant (he owned the restaurants that were adjacent to the places where the Cleveland Orchestra would play).

I was no “chef” tho. I mean someone else did all of the menu design for the season or for the week, someone else did all of the order pulling. Basically they showed me every salad and every dessert and I would put the ingredients together as the orders came in and then order more components for next week.

I was just a teenager, not a gourmet anything. My other cousin - also a teenager - worked the grill and did the same thing I did. Put someone else’s creations together and ordered more stuff.

10

I came in to say that I’m pretty sure Le Bernardain has 'em all… it not more. I know he’s a big fan of the standard French brigade system, so I’m sure he’d fill out his brigade.

11

In his very funny book Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain explained that, yes, he had 10 different line cooks with all the specialties the OP mentions. But whereas the foodies dining at his restaurant probably imagined the grill man cooking up the foie gras and the saucier making the bearnaise sauce were skilled artisans who’d studied at the Cordonbleau, the reality was far more mundane. The grill man and the fry cook were probably ex-cons, while the saucier and the other specialists were probbly illegal aliens from Mexico who’d been busboys or dishwashers a few months earlier.

12

What was the name of the places? I might have eaten there!

Brian

Former Sous Chef