Why I'll Never Stop Calling My Teammates "Chef"
There are two ways to say "chef." One is a practice. The other is a coronation. This is a story about both.
I call everyone "chef." On calls, in messages, in person, to strangers handing me a coffee. People notice. Some laugh. Some ask why. I never correct myself. I never will.
This isn't a quirk I picked up and never shook. It's the most important lesson I ever learned about leadership, and it came in two parts — separated by a decade, connected by a single word spoken two different ways by the same voice.
I was sixteen years old the first time I walked into a professional kitchen. The Boiler Room, Omaha. Not a line cook gig at a chain restaurant — a serious kitchen run by serious people. James Beard nominees. The kind of place where the craft was treated as a discipline, not a job.
Chef Paul Kulik ran that kitchen. And on one of my first days — maybe the first, I don't remember exactly — he laid down a rule that didn't seem important at the time: everyone calls each other "chef." Not just him. Everyone. Dishwashers, prep cooks, line cooks, sous chefs, front of house. No exceptions, no hierarchy. Just the word.
I was sixteen. I couldn't brunoise an onion. I was not a chef by any definition. But the rule wasn't optional, so I said it. "Behind, chef." "Heard, chef." "Corner, chef." Dozens of times a shift, the word came out of my mouth aimed at people who had been cooking since before I was born. It felt like a costume.
But you say a word enough times and it starts to mean something. Not the dictionary meaning — the felt meaning. The weight of it in your mouth when the kitchen is calm versus when the kitchen is literally on fire. That difference is where the lesson lives.
Every kitchen has bad Friday nights. The rail is stacked deep. The grill is behind. Someone just dropped a six-pan of shallots, everywhere, the kind of loss you feel in your prep time, not just your pride. Tickets are printing faster than the line can clear them. Voices get louder. The temperature — already hot — goes up another ten degrees in the space between people.
And then you hear it from the pass: "chef, I need that refire."
Not a name. Not an insult. Not "hey, you" or something worse. chef.
The word does something in that moment that nothing else can. It creates a half-second of cognitive dissonance — just enough to break the circuit between frustration and the person standing next to you. You're not yelling at a human being. You're addressing a professional. The anger stays aimed at the station, the ticket, the timing. Not the person.
That's when I first understood what Kulik had built. He didn't give us an etiquette rule. He gave us a pressure valve — a single word, engineered to redirect conflict away from identity and toward the work. Every time it came out of someone's mouth on a bad night, it reminded everyone in earshot that we were professionals first, frustrated second.
This wasn't culture as vibes. This was culture as architecture.
Here's the thing most people outside the industry don't know, and that too many people inside the industry get backwards: there are two words that sound identical and mean completely different things.
Lowercase "chef" — the one Kulik gave his whole team — is a tool. A term of address. A practice. It's the word you use to keep friction productive, to maintain mutual respect when the heat is on, to remind yourself and the person next to you that you're both here to do a job and the job is what matters. Anyone can use it. Everyone should. The dishwasher is "chef." The new stage is "chef." The Chef is "chef." The universality is the point.
Capital-C "Chef" is something else entirely.
Chef is a title. It comes from the French chef de cuisine — chief of the kitchen. Chief. Captain. The head. Not the hands, not the technique — the head. The one who thinks, decides, directs, and owns the outcome. The etymology is right there in the word: leadership is baked into its DNA.
You don't put Chef on your resume without earning it properly. You don't claim it after graduating culinary school. You don't earn it by learning to cook well. Your team puts it on you — slowly, over years, through a thousand small moments where you proved you could hold the kitchen together when it was falling apart. It's not a promotion. It's a responsibility. A verdict delivered by the people who've worked beside you long enough to know whether you deserve it.
The industry is full of culinary school graduates who walk out with a diploma and "Chef" on their LinkedIn before they've run a single service. They've learned technique. They haven't led. They've studied the craft. They haven't bled for it on a Friday night when the walk-in compressor dies and they've got a dining room full of people who don't care about your problems.
Any real Chef sees it immediately. Not with cruelty — with recognition. Because every Chef remembers the distance between knowing how to cook and knowing how to lead a kitchen. Between executing a dish and owning a service. Between being good at your station and being the person everyone looks at when the station next to them catches fire.
The culinary school kids aren't wrong to aspire to it. They're wrong to assume they've arrived. Chef isn't a credential. It's a call-to-action, and it only means something when it comes from someone qualified to deliver it.
Kulik's rule wasn't arbitrary, and the fact that it works isn't accidental. There's real psychology underneath it — not the kind you learn in a textbook, but the kind you observe when you watch teams perform under pressure for fifteen years.
How you address someone changes how they show up. Calling a coworker "chef" in a heated moment activates their professional identity — it reminds them of their capability, not their failure. The brain responds to identity cues faster than rational thought. By the time the conscious mind processes the frustration, the word has already reframed the interaction. You're not dealing with someone who screwed up. You're dealing with a chef who's having a hard moment.
When conflict is between "chef" and "chef," it's between roles, not egos. The title creates a layer of abstraction between the person and the problem. "Chef, that sauce is broken" lands completely differently than "dude, you messed up the sauce." The information is identical. The frame is everything. One preserves the relationship. The other erodes it. Multiply that across hundreds of interactions per shift, dozens of shifts per month, and the erosion version will destroy a team that the preservation version would have made stronger.
Everyone shares the title, but nobody pretends the hierarchy doesn't exist. The Chef is still the Chef. The dishwasher is still the dishwasher. The chain of command doesn't dissolve because everyone uses the same word. But in the moment of address — in the moment where friction lives — the shared title levels the field just enough to keep communication functional. It doesn't erase rank. It prevents rank from poisoning the interaction when the interaction needs to be about the work.
Culture isn't built in mission statements. It isn't built in team offsites or values posters or quarterly all-hands meetings where someone talks about "who we are." Culture is built in the smallest repeated interactions — what you say when something breaks, how you address the person next to you when you're both drowning, whether "I don't know" is safe to say out loud. Kulik didn't give speeches about team culture. He gave us one word and made us use it until it became instinct. By the time you're stressed enough to snap, the word is already out of your mouth — and it's "chef," not something you'd regret.
One "chef" means nothing. A thousand over the course of a week start to rewire how you see the people around you. Ten thousand over a season and it's in your bones. You can't decide to be respectful under pressure. You can only train for it. The word is the training.
I left the Boiler Room eventually. Moved through other kitchens, other teams, other mentors — relationships that started at the Boiler Room when I was sixteen and are still alive today. I ran kitchens. I built beverage programs. I hired teams and trained cooks and designed systems and failed and recovered and did it all again. Years of growing, refining, learning what leadership actually looks like when you're the one responsible for it.
All this time, "chef" traveled with me. It was in my muscle memory, automatic as "behind" when you pass someone in a narrow space. The word Kulik planted at sixteen had become part of how I moved through the world.
But I was also watching. Watching how the Chefs — the real ones, the capital-C ones — carried the title. Not as a decoration. As a weight. The person the team looks to when the walk-in dies mid-service. The person who makes the call when there's no good option, only less-bad ones. The person who stays calm not because they're not stressed, but because everyone else's calm depends on theirs.
I was building toward something, but I wasn't thinking about it that way. I was just doing the work. The distance between "chef" and "Chef" isn't something you can measure while you're crossing it. You only know you've arrived when someone tells you.
My grandparents' house was the first kitchen I ever stood in.
Not the Boiler Room. Not a restaurant. A house in Iowa where my grandmother Kathy picked me up from school and kept me focused on my studies while my parents were at work, and where my grandfather Tom hosted gatherings for anyone and everyone who would come. Tom taught me to cook from the moment I could reach the counter. Not professionally — he wasn't a Chef. He was something more fundamental than that. He was a host. A man who understood that feeding people is how you build community, how you mark occasions, how you say "you matter" without saying it.
The rhythms of hospitality — the gravitational pull of a kitchen, the ritual of preparing food for people you care about, the understanding that a gathering needs a center and that center is almost always a table — all of that was planted on Tom's property, in Tom's kitchen, at Tom's elbow, years before I knew what a brigade system was or how to hold a knife properly.
Tom passed away in 2014. But the house remained in the family, and it carried everything he'd built into its walls — every gathering, every meal, every moment where the kitchen was the center of gravity and the people around it were the point.
By 2020, the time had come to let it go. The family decided to sell the property. And before we did, we wanted one final gathering. As many loved ones as we could bring together. A proper farewell to the place where so much of who I am — who all of us are — was shaped.
Chef Kulik had remained a family friend through all the years since my apprenticeship at the Boiler Room. When we told him about the house-cooling, he offered to come set up a whole-pig roast. One of the masters of the craft, standing in my grandparents' backyard, doing what he does — feeding people, honoring an occasion with the seriousness it deserves.
I was there helping with the pig. Working alongside him the way I had years ago, except now the dynamic was different. I wasn't a sixteen-year-old kid. I'd run kitchens. I'd built programs. I'd led teams. The years between the Boiler Room and that backyard held an entire career.
And then Kulik told me he had somewhere he needed to be. He had to leave before the pig was done.
I told him I'd take care of it.
He came over. Looked me in the eye. Shook my hand. And said:
"I know you have this under control, I'm going to take off, Chef."
Not "chef." Chef.
I heard it immediately. The weight was different. The emphasis was different. This wasn't the universal "chef" we'd been saying to each other for over a decade — the tool, the pressure valve, the shared title that kept kitchens functional. This was deliberate. One of the people who'd shaped my understanding of the craft, looking at me and calling me a peer. Not a student. Not a subordinate. Not a kid who once couldn't brunoise an onion. A Chef.
I teared up a little bit, I don't think he noticed. I thanked him for everything — and we both knew "everything" meant more than the pig, more than the party. It meant the word itself. The practice he'd built into me at sixteen that had shaped how I saw every team I'd ever been part of. The years of watching, learning, growing into someone he trusted to own the outcome completely. Everything.
He left. I finished the roast. Pulled in as many hands as I could gather from the party — friends, family, people who'd never worked a service in their lives — and we pulled that pig apart and served it together. I made it the centerpiece of the gathering, the way Tom would have. The way the kitchen in that house had always been the center of gravity.
The pig was good. Really, really good. But, the gathering, that was everything it needed to be. And I carried that moment forward — not as a credential on a resume, but as a responsibility I hadn't asked for and couldn't put down.
Kulik didn't promote me that day. He recognized something that had already happened — that the years of work, the progression, the leadership I'd grown into, had crossed a threshold he could see. I had become someone he trusted to take charge, fully, without supervision. Not because I knew how to roast a pig — because I knew how to own the outcome for thirty people in a place that mattered.
This is the difference between a title that's granted and a title that's witnessed. Capital-C Chef can't be self-declared because it's not about what you think of yourself. It's about what the people who've watched you work think of you. It's a verdict. And it only means something when it comes from someone who's earned the right to deliver it.
You don't become a senior engineer by updating your LinkedIn. You become one when the team starts treating you like one — asking your opinion on architecture, trusting your judgment in incidents, deferring to your calls without being told to. The title follows the recognition, not the other way around.
Once you understand what Kulik built with a single word, you start seeing the same pattern in every high-performance team that operates under pressure.
When a production system goes down, the best engineering cultures run blameless post-mortems — "the system failed" rather than "you failed." The language is deliberate, designed to keep analysis aimed at the problem so people tell the truth about what happened instead of defending themselves. Same principle. Same architecture. Different kitchen.
Under fire, military teams replace names with rank. You're not asking Dave to cover you — you're telling Sergeant to cover your six. The role absorbs the friction. The person stays intact. Surgeons don't use first names during procedures. The formality isn't distance — it's protocol that maintains focus when the stakes are highest.
The best engineering teams review code, not coders. "This function could be simplified" versus "you overcomplicated this." Same information. Completely different frame. One keeps the conversation about the work. The other makes it about the person.
The pattern is universal: high-performance teams under pressure use language to separate the person from the problem. Not because they're soft. Because they've learned that friction aimed at people destroys teams, and friction aimed at problems builds them. It's not politeness. It's engineering.
I left the kitchen. I went into arboriculture — different team, different pressure, same need for trust and clear communication when someone's fifty feet up a tree with a running chainsaw. Then into tech — different domain again, same dynamics of collaboration under constraint.
"Chef" never left. It comes out on calls, in messages, in person. People notice. Some laugh. Some ask why. Nobody's ever asked me to stop.
It's a compass. Every time I call someone "chef," I'm making a micro-commitment — choosing, in the smallest possible moment, to see them as a professional first. Capable. Worthy of respect. Doing their best with what they've got. Even when I'm frustrated. Especially when I'm frustrated. The word resets my own frame before it does anything for the other person.
It's also a litmus test. People who lean into it — who grin, or say it back, or just roll with it — tend to be the people who understand that respect is a practice, not a feeling. Something you do, not something you wait to feel before offering.
And it's a thread that connects every team I've ever been part of. Every "chef" is a small act of gratitude for the lesson Kulik planted at sixteen — that a single word, used consistently, can change the entire texture of how people work together.
For anyone building a team — in a kitchen, a startup, an open-source project, a company of any size — the question isn't "what are our values?" It's "what do we say to each other when things go wrong?" Engineer that — the actual words, the actual rituals, the actual habits — and the values take care of themselves.
I still call everyone "chef." Friends, colleagues, strangers, my AI development partner. Most of them have never held a knife professionally. That's not the point and never was.
The lowercase "chef" is a practice — a way of moving through the world that keeps friction aimed at problems, not people. Anyone can adopt it. Every team should.
The uppercase "Chef" is something rarer. A recognition that can only come from the people who've watched you work, who've trusted you in the hard moments, who know what the word costs to earn. You don't claim it. You receive it. And once you do, you spend the rest of your career trying to be worthy of the moment someone looked you in the eye and said it like they meant it.
I think about that handshake in Tom and Kathy's backyard more than I'd probably admit. The place where I first learned to cook — where my grandfather taught me that feeding people is how you say the things that matter — and the place where one of the masters of the craft looked at me and, for the first time, called me a peer. A whole pig on the fire. Thirty people I loved in the yard. And a word that carried the weight of a decade.
Thank You, Chef.
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