Please Stop Calling Me Chef

David Letterman used to have a recurring bit on Late Night and The Late Show where he would talk to somebody on the streets of New York via remote, with the premise that they were going to play a game. Only the studio audience knew that the game was called “Please Stop Calling Me Chief,” where that title was the objective and single rule. Letterman would interview the person while continually referring to them as “chief,” and the contestant “won” if they asked him to stop calling them that. To my knowledge, nobody ever won.

I talk to a lot of chefs, and I almost never address them as “chef” in conversation unless I’m in some sort of direct kitchen- or cooking-related physical context. On the other hand, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a chef telling someone else to stop calling them “chef.” I fully appreciate the lore and tradition around the honorific in kitchen work, and I like the democratic-seeming way that all chefs may use it amongst themselves while working (rather than just the main chef).

I hadn’t really thought much about why I resisted doing this until recently. I believe it’s two things: one, coming from me as a non-chef, it feels grating or unctuous. Not servile exactly, but more like ingratiating or false or precious. Secondly, having the chef honorific travel outside the kitchen into other contexts also feels, to me, like a vestigial armature of traditional cheffy personality cults. And who needs any more of that, these days.

It comes across as particularly odd when talking about a chef with someone else, like a rep or publicist, who says something like “Chef would be available for a call next week” etc. I almost never respond in kind, without thinking about it as such, and I wonder—am I giving offense to both the chefs and their colleagues by not doing so? Who do I think I am, using their name???

I’ve never heard back about it if so—never been told “please start calling me chef.” But perhaps that sort of faux pas is just chalked up to my uncouth nature. And again it doesn’t bother me when other people do it, long as it doesn’t bother them when I don’t. Incidentally, the dude at the top of this post is Ettore Boiardi, a.k.a. Chef Boyardee. Pretty sure I would definitely call him chef.