Who does what in a restaurant: the kitchen brigade, decoded for a team of six

The classical kitchen brigade defined a specialist for nearly every task in a professional kitchen. Most of those job titles no longer exist as separate roles, and several that survived now mean something different from what they meant a century ago. That gap is where staffing mistakes happen: an owner writes a job description for a chef de partie and hires a line cook, or builds a tip pool that federal law does not allow.

This guide does three things. It maps every classical brigade position to what it is actually called in 2026, gives realistic rosters at three kitchen sizes, and settles the front-of-house role confusion that carries real legal risk. Wage figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the tip rules come from the Department of Labor rather than from industry blogs.

What is the kitchen brigade system?

The brigade de cuisine is a hierarchy of specialised stations, formalised by Georges-Auguste Escoffier for the large hotel kitchens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Each station owns one category of production so that tasks are never duplicated and orders move through the kitchen in a fixed path. Sources disagree on how many positions the original system named, reporting anywhere from around fourteen to more than twenty, because the roster scaled with the size of the hotel.

The important point is not the exact count. It is the operating principle: specialisation buys speed at the cost of headcount. A kitchen that can afford ten specialists cooks faster than a kitchen of five generalists. When labour costs rise, that trade collapses, which is exactly what happened to the brigade.

These titles are one slice of a much larger working vocabulary. For the floor and kitchen shorthand these roles actually speak during service, plus the metrics that measure them, see our restaurant terms and kitchen slang glossary.

Every classical brigade position, and whether it still exists

The stations below are the core of the classical system. The right-hand column is the honest answer about 2026: most specialist titles have been absorbed into “line cook,” named by equipment rather than by product.

French title	Literal meaning	Responsibility	Status in 2026
Chef de cuisine	Chief of the kitchen	Runs the kitchen, owns the menu	Survives, often as executive chef
Sous chef	Under chief	Second in command, runs service	Survives, near-universal
Chef de partie	Station chief	Runs one production department	Survives in name only; usually a line cook
Saucier	Sauce maker	Sauces, stews, sauteed items	Rare, absorbed into saute
Poissonnier	Fish cook	Fish and shellfish, fish sauces	Rare, absorbed into the line
Rotisseur	Roast cook	Roasts, braises, jus	Rare, moved to prep shifts
Grillardin	Grill cook	Grilled and broiled items	Survives as grill cook
Entremetier	In-between cook	Soups, vegetables, starches, eggs	Gone as a title, split across stations
Garde manger	Keeper of the food	Cold plates, salads, charcuterie	Survives, usually called pantry
Patissier	Pastry cook	Bread, pastry, plated desserts	Survives as pastry chef
Tournant	Turning cook	Relief cook across all stations	Survives as swing cook
Commis	Junior cook	Assists a station, learns it	Survives as prep or junior line cook
Plongeur	Diver	Dishwashing, pot wash, cleaning	Survives as dishwasher
Aboyeur	Barker	Calls tickets, checks plates	Survives as expeditor

Two entries deserve a note. Chef de partie is the most misused title in US hiring: classically it meant managing a department and the commis under you, but in most independent restaurants it now describes one cook working a station alone. Garde manger is the specialist role that survived most intact, because cold production genuinely needs separate space, timing and equipment.

What a 2026 kitchen roster actually looks like

Kitchen headcount follows labour cost, and labour cost is now the line that decides profitability. Below are three representative rosters. They are illustrative structures rather than survey data: use them as a shape to compare your own schedule against, not as a benchmark.

Five-person kitchen (neighbourhood bistro, cafe): kitchen manager who also works the line, one hot line cook covering grill, saute and fry, one cold and pantry cook, one prep cook on mornings, one dishwasher.

Fifteen-person kitchen (high-volume casual, mid-size full service): executive chef, two sous chefs, six line cooks split across saute, grill, fry and pantry, three prep cooks, one expeditor, two dishwashers.

Forty-person kitchen (hotel banquet, large restaurant): executive chef, chef de cuisine, four sous chefs, fifteen line cooks across shifts, eight prep cooks, three pastry, two expeditors, two receivers or stewards, four dishwashers.

The pattern across all three: mise en place moves out of service and into a dedicated morning shift as soon as headcount allows. That single split, rather than any classical station structure, is what separates a kitchen that holds ticket times from one that does not. For what staffing pressure costs, see our restaurant labor and turnover statistics.

Front-of-house roles explained

Front-of-house titles are less standardised than kitchen ones, and the boundaries matter more, because they determine who can legally share tips.

• Host or hostess. Manages the door, the book and the seating flow. Controls how evenly work lands across sections, which makes it the most underrated FOH role.
• Maitre d’. Runs the dining room floor: VIP handling, table touches, recovery when service goes wrong. In some venues a senior host; in others a manager with hiring authority, and that difference has legal consequences.
• Server. Owns the guest relationship for the whole meal: menu guidance, ordering, pacing, payment.
• Busser. Clears, sanitises and resets tables. Driven by guests leaving.
• Food runner. Carries finished plates from the pass to the table and announces them. Driven by kitchen tickets.
• Server assistant. A combined, more senior support role: water, bread, marking silverware, clearing, anticipating a specific server’s section.
• Barback. Keeps the bar stocked with ice, garnish, glassware and bottles so the bartender never stops pouring. Little to no guest contact.
• Bartender. Makes drinks for the bar and for the dining room’s tickets, and serves guests seated at the bar.
• Sommelier. Builds and manages the wine list and cellar, and sells and serves wine on the floor.

Busser vs food runner vs server assistant

These three are constantly treated as one job, and in a small dining room one person often does all of it. In a busy one they are separated because each is driven by a different clock.

	Busser	Food runner	Server assistant
Core task	Clear, sanitise, reset	Deliver plates from the pass	Support one server’s section end to end
Paced by	Guests leaving	Kitchen tickets	The server’s flow
Guest contact	Brief	Brief, at delivery	Moderate and repeated
Fails when	Tables sit dirty, seating stalls	Food waits under the heat lamp	Server drowns in small tasks

A useful diagnostic: if your tables sit dirty at peak you are short a busser, and if food sits at the pass you are short a runner. Adding a server does not fix either one.

Barback vs bartender

	Barback	Bartender
Core task	Restock ice, garnish, glassware, kegs	Make drinks, serve bar guests
Guest contact	Rare	Constant
Measured by	Speed of replenishment	Check average, service quality, accuracy
Revenue role	Indirect, protects bartender’s speed	Direct

The barback exists so the bartender never leaves the well. If your bartender is fetching ice during a rush, the bar’s throughput is capped by walking distance rather than by mixing speed. For how bar terminology and tiers work on the menu side, see our bar menu guide.

Maitre d’ vs host vs general manager

This is the comparison with real legal exposure. A host is an hourly, tip-eligible employee. A general manager is management and cannot receive pooled tips. The maitre d’ sits between them, and where they fall depends on actual duties rather than on the title printed on the schedule. If they hire, fire, direct other employees’ work and meet the executive duties test, they are a supervisor for tip purposes, and including them in a pool is a violation. Title inflation, handing someone a senior title without changing pay or authority, is how restaurants walk into this by accident.

What US restaurant staff earn

The authoritative source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics programme. The figures below are national medians from the May 2025 OEWS release, published in May 2026, and are the most recent comprehensive national estimates.

Occupation	SOC code	Median hourly wage, May 2025
Chefs and head cooks	35-1011	$20.21
Bartenders	35-3011	$19.61
Waiters and waitresses	35-3031	$19.26
Cooks, restaurant	35-2014	$18.62
Dishwashers	35-9021	$16.49

Three caveats that most published wage tables leave out. First, several restaurant job titles have no BLS occupation of their own: food runner and server assistant are not separate occupations, and bussers and barbacks are counted together under 35-9011, “dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers.” Second, sommelier has no dedicated BLS code at all, so any sommelier salary you see quoted comes from job-board data, which is self-reported and not comparable to BLS estimates. Third, for tipped occupations the reported wage includes tips, so the spread between venues is far wider than a national median suggests.

Wages are also only part of the labour line. Payroll taxes, benefits and turnover cost sit on top, and labour is the single biggest divider between profitable and unprofitable restaurants; the benchmarks are in our restaurant profit margin data.

Who can legally be in a tip pool

Tip pooling is where staffing decisions become legal exposure, so this section sticks to Department of Labor sources. This is general information, not legal advice.

Managers and supervisors are always excluded from the pool. The Department of Labor states that an employer may not keep employees’ tips for any purpose, and that managers and supervisors may not keep tips received by employees, including through tip pools. A manager may keep a tip a customer gives them directly for service that they alone provided. The rule applies whether or not the employer takes a tip credit (DOL Fact Sheet 15B).

Who else may be included depends on the tip credit. If the employer claims a tip credit and pays a cash wage below the full minimum wage, a mandatory pool is limited to employees who customarily and regularly receive tips. If the employer pays the full minimum wage and takes no tip credit, the pool may also include back-of-house staff such as cooks and dishwashers. The DOL’s tip regulations page and Fact Sheet 15 set out the framework, and the federal cash wage floor for tipped employees has stood at $2.13 an hour, with many states requiring more; the DOL’s state table is the reference.

The 80/20 rule is no longer in force, and a lot of published guidance still says it is. The Fifth Circuit vacated the Department’s 80/20 and thirty-minute rules for tipped employees in Restaurant Law Center v. U.S. Department of Labor (opinion), and the Department subsequently restored the earlier dual jobs regulation, which sets no bright-line time limit on non-tipped side work. If your scheduling policy is still built around a 20% side-work cap because an article told you to, the rule behind it no longer exists federally. State law may still impose its own limits.

A mandatory service charge is not a tip. Under IRS Revenue Ruling 2012-18, a payment counts as a tip only where it is free from compulsion, the customer sets the amount, it is not dictated by employer policy, and the customer decides who receives it. An automatic charge fails those tests, so amounts distributed to staff from it are wages rather than tips, with different withholding and overtime treatment. Our restaurant tipping statistics cover what guests actually tip and how that has moved.

Certification: what the credentials mean

Two bodies matter in the US. For wine service, the Court of Master Sommeliers, Americas runs a four-level sequence that must be passed in order: Introductory Sommelier, Certified Sommelier, Advanced Sommelier, and the Master Sommelier Diploma. For culinary roles, the American Culinary Federation operates a tiered certification ladder from Certified Culinarian through Certified Sous Chef, Certified Chef de Cuisine and Certified Executive Chef up to Certified Master Chef, with credentials renewed every five years.

Neither is required to work. Both are useful as an objective reference point when you are writing a job description or setting pay bands, because they define competence in a way that a job title alone does not.

How digital ordering changes the floor, and how it does not

Self-ordering and QR menus shift work rather than removing it. Questions that used to reach a server, such as what is in a dish, whether an item contains nuts, what is available in Spanish, or whether something is sold out, get answered on the guest’s phone. That frees FOH time for the parts of hospitality that only a person can do. It does not eliminate the roles: someone still runs food, clears tables, and reads the room. Our self-service kiosk statistics go through what the evidence actually shows about order value and speed, including the findings that contradict the vendor claims.

The practical staffing benefit is narrower and more real than the automation story suggests. When your menu lives on a page you control, a sold-out item is marked once and every guest sees it, which removes a whole category of interruption from the line and the floor. If your set menus and course structures need to change with the calendar too, see a la carte vs prix fixe.

Duckhub builds the menu side of that: a QR menu your team updates in real time, in multiple languages, with 0% commission on orders.