Is a kitchen manager the same as an executive chef?

A kitchen manager is likely to have graduated from a culinary management or hospitality management program. However, an executive or head chef usually completes a rigorous culinary school program to learn the science behind food and its preparation. If the chef was concerned about the way a dish was being prepared, he would ask the kitchen manager to discuss the problem with the cook in question. In the restaurant I referred to earlier, the chef was in charge of managing the menu, purchasing and managing the preparation team.

You'll rarely find a kitchen manager in a high-end or fine-dining restaurant because then a chef would be needed to design and manage the menu. Smaller establishments often combine one or more stations and assign them to a single chef to maximize the efficiency of a limited kitchen staff. Before we analyze how a chef differs from a kitchen manager, it's important to know some background about the different types of chefs. In general, a head chef is very similar to a kitchen manager, so these are the two roles that are most often compared.

Also known as group chefs, executive chefs usually supervise several locations and very rarely cook outside of the experimental kitchen. It wasn't a problem for me to get kitchen manager jobs early in my career, since I myself don't have a formal education and instead I was promoted based on my performance. They act as kitchen managers and perform most of the tasks that a kitchen manager performs, in addition to designing and managing the menu. A clear vision of where you're going allows you to focus on your dream job in the kitchen and not look back.

With all the different types of “chef” defined above, it becomes more difficult to define the difference between a chef and a kitchen manager. Since cost controls are such an important part of the job, kitchen managers are often in charge of managing the ordering and inventory process to control food costs, as well as internal scheduling to control labor costs. There are other topics that kitchen managers can handle depending on the restaurant. Although in this case my father was in charge of the kitchen, this is not always the case and the two titles generally mean different things and, in most cases, do not exist together.

Kitchen managers focus more on the business side of the restaurant than on managing the menu. There are many chefs who manage to earn their jobs without a formal education, but to have the deep knowledge in food science necessary to excel as a chef, the best option is a cooking school.