The Chef Professor

The Chef Professor honors a struggle that many industry-practitioners-turned-academics know but rarely name. With both rigor and heart, the book invites us into a new way of thinking about our discipline and who belongs in academia. The two Shawns/Seans leave the reader with much to consider, and a rare gratitude for the journey itself.

To be a chef is to labor, to research, to create, to teach, and to endure. To be a professor is pretty much the same. To be an autoethnographer is to weave the two worlds together. Bucher and Lee did precisely that in The Chef Professor, an excellent and much-needed qualitative resource for the hospitality academy.

The Chef Professor is unlike anything else in hospitality scholarship. It does much more than introduce autoethnography as a research approach. It shows what autoethnography can be. The two Shawns/Seans remind us that writing is not simply a way to communicate knowledge but a way of producing it. They invite readers to reflect on issues of meritocracy, neoliberal academia, gender, and the place of hospitality as a field. The result is intellectually stimulating, emotionally engaging, and refreshingly honest. I have no doubt that this book will become an essential reading for hospitality scholars, especially those beginning their journey with autoethnography and qualitative inquiry. It also leaves me optimistic about the future of qualitative hospitality research in the hands of these two outstanding scholars.

This is a book about courage: the courage to value embodied knowledge, to challenge inherited academic orthodoxies, and to argue that the epistemologies emerging from hospitality and culinary arts deserve equal standing within contemporary scholarship. The Chef Professor will undoubtedly become essential reading for hospitality educators, practitioner-researchers, doctoral students, and qualitative scholars seeking richer, more human-centered ways of understanding inquiry.

I loved reading The Chef Professor, the clarity and honesty of the author’s voice bring to life the tensions between professional practice and academic expectations, while giving much needed visibility to the often-overlooked experiences of chef pracademics. What makes this work particularly compelling is the way it weaves personal narrative with broader institutional challenges. This is an important and engaging read, one that will resonate deeply with scholars and practitioners alike, as well as anyone interested in the evolving identity of hospitality education.

The Chef Professor makes a distinctive and timely contribution to hospitality, tourism, and business research by examining the experiences of culinary pracademics within the neoliberal academy. The authors offer a rare insider account of chef pracademics navigating the neoliberal academy. This is an important text for scholars, educators, and institutional leaders seeking a more inclusive and practice-informed hospitality academy.

This book provides thoughtful insights into what it means to navigate academia with a chef identity and how that identity both complements and challenges more traditional notions of scholarship. I would highly recommend it not only to chef professors, but also to academic leaders seeking to better understand the unique contributions that chef scholars can make to teaching, research, and engagement with industry.

Upon first encountering the term pracademic, I immediately felt a connection to it, as it represents a powerful bridge between professional practice and academic inquiry. The Chef Professor illustrates this concept through a compelling autoethnographic account of a chef’s journey into academia. For those trained in traditional research paradigms, autoethnography may appear to challenge familiar notions of objectivity, structure, and replication. Yet this book reveals a different form of rigor, one grounded in reflexivity, storytelling, and careful exploration of the relationship between self and culture. The result is a deeply human form of scholarship that generates insight through experience rather than distance. As a chef-pracademic myself, I highly recommend this book to qualitative and arts-based researchers, as well as to industry professionals considering an academic path. It offers a thoughtful and inspiring example of how practitioners can transform experience into meaningful scholarships.

The Chef Professor is a compelling and thought-provoking contribution to hospitality scholarship that gives voice to a group too often overlooked in academia, the chef-scholar navigating the intersection of professional practice and the college classroom. Bucher and Lee illuminate the personal, professional, and institutional challenges of transitioning from the kitchen to the university. This is an important and timely book that will resonate with hospitality educators, practitioners, students, and anyone interested in the evolving relationship between industry and higher education.