Chapter 3: An Entrepreneurial Career as a Response to the Need for Challenge: The Case of Gourmet Chefs

The career of a gourmet chef has become a very attractive and desirable career path (Dreisbach, 2014). A gourmet chef is an haute cuisine chef, an inherently creative and innovative chef who enacts symbolic value while striving for dependable excellence in a high-pressure environment (Newton, Damji, & Alfa-Wali, 2010;). Haute cuisine chefs are “more than ever creators who explore and experiment with ideas in dedicated culinary labs and continuously evolve the menu of their restaurants” (Svejenova et al., 2015, p. 186); their gourmet meals are an aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual experience. To be able to maintain autonomy and creativity at work, many gourmet chefs own their own restaurants (Leschziner, 2007; Strandgaard Pedersen, Svejenova, Jones, & De Weerd-Nederhof, 2006). Simply put, the work of gourmet chefs often combines elements of the work of artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs with that of a chef.