A chef is a person who cooks professionally. In a professional kitchen setting, the term is used only for the one person in charge of everyone else in the kitchen, the executive chef. "Chef" (from Latin caput) is the abbreviated form of the French phrase chef de cuisine, the "chief" or "head" of a kitchen.

The title chef in the culinary profession originates from the roots of haute cuisine in the 19th century. The English use of the word chef has become a term that is sometimes used to mean any professional cook, regardless of rank. Below are various titles given to those working in a professional kitchen and each can be considered a title for a type of chef.

Many of the titles are based on the brigade system (Brigade de cuisine), documented by Georges Auguste Escoffier, while others have a more general meaning depending on the individual kitchen. Not all restaurants will use these titles as each establishment may have its own set guidelines to organization. Specialized and hierarchal chef titles are usually found only in fine-dining, upscale restaurants; kitchen staff members at casual restaurants such as diners are more often called "cook" or "short-order cook".

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