“Yes, chef”, do you say? Catering workers have feelings about it.

As a young pastry in Eleven Madison Park, Genie Kwon got used to a cuisine tradition: each time the chef shouted an order, the other cooks responded in unison, “Yes, chef!”

Or as you may have heard on the FX program “The Bear”: “Yes, chef!”

For a long time, Ms. Kwon, who is a co -owner of the Philippin Kasama restaurant in Chicago, associated the sentence with an inflexible cuisine hierarchy with Eleven Madison Park, known for its demanding vision of gastronomy.

How it is pronounced

/ yĕs shĕf /

It was up to a few years ago, when she started hearing friends outside the industry using the sentence with casualness and sometimes sarcastically.

Can you catch my jacket? Yes, chef!

Pass salt and pepper? Yes, chef!

The term that Ms. Kwon pronounced once by intimidation in the kitchen was now the relaxed language in friends.

You can credit the rise of the sentence in everyday language to programs like “The Bear” or films like “The Menu”, which explore the belly of the catering work and have aroused a renewed fascination for the terminology of the kitchen.

The exact origins of “yes, chef” are unknown, but some historians find him to the French chief of the 19th century Auguste Escoffier, who created the brigade system, a strict chain of command for roles in a kitchen, the chef meeting the orders. (The story of the rear explains why it is “yes” to Eleven Madison Park.)

According to Luke Barr, author of “Ritz and Escoffier”, the system was an answer to Escoffier’s experience in abusive and dysfunctional restaurants. He thought that the hierarchy would bring order and “calm in the kitchen,” said Barr. Say “yes, chef!” pointed out a recognition of a directive and a level of conformity which underlined the power structure.

Like many French culinary traditions, the brigade system has established a new standard for restaurants. When the Covid-19 pandemic untied the catering sector overnight, discussions broke out on the brigade system, and if that contributed to the exploitation of workers, who are often confronted with verbal violence, have little or no advantages for health and supporting professional risks, such as burning in the oven.

Cooks on “The bear” use “Yes, chef!” To approach all the cooking staff, regardless of their status. But this is not always the case in real restaurants, where an “curved assistant” could say it in response to an “absurd instruction,” said Barr.

“This term, which is originally this connotation of respect and serenity in the kitchen,” he added, “came to symbolize this abuse of power.”

This is why some workers do not like people outside the industry to have adopted its jargon.

“It seems almost disrespectful to me,” said Darron Cardosa, a longtime server that manages the website The Bitchy Waiter.

When Ms. Kwon and her husband, Tim Flores, opened Kasama in 2020, they wanted to create a collaborative environment. They did not ask their staff to say “yes, chief”, but workers have always used.

Mr. Flores said he had realized that “yes, the chief” was not the problem – they were chefs who lowered the workers. “The idea that we must dismantle the hierarchy and the brigade is wrong,” he said. “We have to get rid of toxic culture.”

Even Mr. Cardosa said that the movement of “yes, chef” outside restaurants is perhaps a sign that the language of cooking can evolve, as well as the culture of cooking.

“Perhaps it is not that bad that it does not mean what it meant 15 years ago,” he said.

Priya Krishna is a journalist for the Times food section and New York Times cuisine. It is also currently a critic of temporary restaurants.