Depends on your definition of “chef”. Was he ever the head chef at a restaurant, or owned his own restaurant? No.
He was originally a cinematographer and video director, and did a lot of commercial work. When he came up with the idea for Good Eats, he went to culinary school, and graduated from the New England Culinary Institute, in order to gain the training and knowledge needed to create and host the show.
So, he is trained as a chef, though I’m guessing that his work experience as a chef is likely limited to what he did during his time at NECI.
The New England Culinary Institute, CIA, or Johnson and Wales will tell you to not even think about considering yourself a chef without your education plus 15 years in the industry. There is more to being a chef than writing recipes and cooking.
I can think of several times during the show (Feasting on Asphalt) when he did it precisely is a “self-lampooning, done-for-comedy kind of schtick”. In fact, I didn’t find it funny since it was so obvious. Maybe there were other times when he was a real life douche, but I didn’t notice them.
As far as the original question goes, I only really watch him on Good Eats. I think he is more preachy, with his diet and sustainable food and everything, than he has been in the past. I think that was mainly evident in the first few episodes of this season, and he has gotten back to the old Alton pretty much now. I will say that my wife also thinks he is much too skinny.
Maybe, but Good Eats is pretty much geared towards people cooking in their homes, it doesn’t really have anything to do with running a big kitchen or spending hours on the perfect meal to impress someone or running a restaurant or catering for a large gathering or many of the other skills I imagine you’d need on the job training for. Even if he had those skills, they’d be a pretty marginal asset for what he does.
As to the OP, I don’t really see what your talking about. I think his main problem is Food Network decided to massively over-expose him. He was very good creating and starring in his scripted TV show, but for MCing and non-scripted stuff he’s just kinda mediocre. I’m not sure why they didn’t play to his strengths and create more scripted stuff for him to do.
The main draw of Good Eats was mixing the cooking stuff with food-science, history and anthropological mini-lectures. They should’ve had him create a second show where he ditched the cooking and just did documentaries on the “edu-tainment” bits of Good Eats.