cheffing

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The professional work and craft of a chef, from preparing ingredients to cooking and presenting dishes in a kitchen.

   Cheffing demands long hours on your feet and steady nerves under pressure.

   She fell in love with cheffing during a summer job at a coastal hotel.

   Similarcooking, cookery

   Note

   A name for the trade as a whole, used without an article or a plural: people talk about cheffing, never a cheffing. It is not only kitchen talk. Marcia Texler Segal's Gender and Food (2016) writes of "the work of cheffing" when asking who performs it. Unlike the verb's -ing form, it can stand at the head of such of-phrases and serve as a subject in its own right.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of chef.

   He is cheffing for a private client three nights a week.

   While cheffing at the gala, she managed two hundred covers single-handedly.

   Note

   Everything the verb chef can mean, this form can mean too, and the verb has more lives than the kitchen. In its cooking sense it is informal: he's cheffing at a bistro sounds conversational where he works as a chef does not. In Multicultural London English, to chef someone is to stab them, and in internet slang it can mean to impress, so context decides which is meant.

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