system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 do most chefs actually wear those chef hats, If so why? And if not where does the idea that they do come from?

Been puzzling me for a while.
gpt
It depends on where you are in the world, but for the most part; absolutely not. It's a classic French thing, hundreds of years old, and a whole fuckin' lot of places once looked to France for their ideas about fine dining. This means they emulated the French, so we got a lot of French chef's hats.

Contemporary chefs just don't wear those absurdly tall and ridiculous looking hats. They absolutely will wear a nice white hat, but they're small and tight. The hats keep hair and sweat out of their eyes and out of their food. You want your chefs wearing hats or hairnets.

If the chefs are visible to your dining public, you want their hats to be white. Clean, white hats on your chefs signify a clean kitchen, and customers want to know that the restaurant they're eating in is clean. Especially in a post-Kitchen Nightmares world. Black hats, while common, aren't easy for a customer to see cleanliness in.