In early modern Lyon, cooks were far from constituting a homogeneous professional group. Whereas some of them, both men and women, were employed in private houses by a social elite, others were progressively integrated into different guilds through a long process of institutionalization and control of professional practices that took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, the great variety of those who were cooking for the public brought with it tensions and conflicts, the analysis of which allows us to highlight the eco- nomic and social issues at stake in cooking for the public in a large commercial and industrious city.