Been puzzling me for a while.
In: Other
It depends on where you are in the world, but for the most part; absolutely not. It’s a classic French thing, hundreds of years old, and a whole fuckin’ lot of places once looked to France for their ideas about fine dining. This means they emulated the French, so we got a lot of French chef’s hats.
Contemporary chefs just don’t wear those absurdly tall and ridiculous looking hats. They absolutely will wear a nice white hat, but they’re small and tight. The hats keep hair and sweat out of their eyes and out of their food. You want your chefs wearing hats or hairnets.
If the chefs are visible to your dining public, you want their hats to be white. Clean, white hats on your chefs signify a clean kitchen, and customers want to know that the restaurant they’re eating in is clean. Especially in a post-Kitchen Nightmares world. Black hats, while common, aren’t easy for a customer to see cleanliness in.
Anyone actually working in a restaraunt kitchen, chef or no, doesn’t wear those big hats. They aren’t practical. You need something that’s much closer to a “normal” hat that will stay on your head, but still keep your hair out of food.
Where I worked the chefs wore tall white hats if they were on on floor cutting meat or something similar to that being visible to guests, as well as a white coat. But when they cook they wear all kinds of different hats it’s more for function than style.
At Fresgos, a restaurant near my place, the Chef/Owner an old German guy actually wears the big white chef hat all the time.
Classically a French style hat, the tall chef hats to which you are referring are rarely if ever worn in the U.S..
I am a woman chef, and have worked in many styles of kitchens–none of which had the cartoonish stylings of Ratatouille.
Chef coats and 50’s style bandanas, ball caps, or other “regular” hats are the lesser formal kitchen dress.
The vented flat top, eraser head looking, style are the more formal or open kitchen wear–generally…but never have I seen the French poof.
As others have mentioned, most chefs do not actually wear those hats. Even in many world-class restaurants you won’t see such hats. It is simply too cumbersome and not particularly comfortable.
The tall multi-fold hats that we associate with chefs has a history dating back to the 1700s but it wasn’t until the early 1800s that the hat become standardized by Chef Marie-Antoine Careme, and then made popularized by Chef Auguste Escoffier. Since much of the culinary world used French chefs and kitchens as their inspiration, the hats eventually started to be seen in kitchens all around the world.
The color white was decided because it gives the appearance of cleanliness. The different heights of the hat often represent the rank within a kitchen, with the tallest hat belonging to the head chef. And the 100 folds within the hat are said to represent 100 different ways to cook an egg.
I worked at the Grand Canyon for a summer and they had us wear them, even though the kitchen was not visible to dining area. I can see the reasoning for the style. The hat doesn’t sit directly on top of the head so it allows your head to breath. Modern hats are a lot better at this now. Every other place I worked has had us wear baseball style caps or anything besides beanies or a material that won’t shed. Some go no hat with a shaved head and some use just a hairnet. The hairnet usually is worn by people who have longer hair that won’t stay under a cap.
[removed]
Here in the states most dont wear those hats. Every chef ive worked with has either worn a nicer version of what the company gave us (the cooks) or no hat(they had very short hair in that case). When they did, they wore their chef whites. Like the other dude said, it shows that the kitchen/BOH is clean. Its more of a show to guests.
To stop hair getting in food, to show who is in charge (long hat is usually the head chef) and sometimes to regulate temperature of the head (long hat with hole at the top) . All depends on the hat, mines just a flat one that stops my hair getting everywhere.
Latest Answers