"Chef" doesn't just refer to someone who can cook well and who heads up a public-facing kitchen, or one special area of the cuisine. Becoming a chef takes an extensive amount of training and certification, and it's a title awarded to only the most creative and hard-working people in the world of food. Once the transition from cook to chef is made, the job opportunities tend to move into the direction of impressive and influential. Among the most important and illustrious kitchen-leading jobs in the world: executive chef at the White House. There are only so many U.S. presidents (one at a time), and only one chef can be counted upon to feed the leader of the free world as well as that official's spouse and children, and to create public and state dinners to remember.
Serving as executive chef in the White House involves a lot of creative chef magic as well as day-to-day regular meal prep. That chef, and their staff, must also abide by a whole series of regulations, and otherwise extraneous tasks they wouldn't find working in a restaurant somewhere. Here then are all of the special and quirky dispensations, steadfast rules, and levels of oversight the White House executive chef has to keep in mind every day.