The dog is named Chef because he looked like a chef. That is the entire reasoning, and it is somehow the least remarkable thing about how Tree Thomas got him.
Thomas is a singer and rapper (his single “Aquarius,” off the EP SXGNS, went viral; he has collaborated with Kevin Gates), a lifestyle model, and a former professional basketball player in the Malta Basketball Association. He is also, now, primarily known to strangers in burrito lines as the guy with the dog on TikTok.
The story of how he became that is not a cute one.
What happened on the street
Thomas was out with friends in downtown San Francisco during a Golden State Warriors championship celebration when he saw a man on the street with a puppy on a leash. The puppy was maybe three months old and not much bigger than a hand. The man had the leash around the puppy’s throat, hoisting him off the ground and kicking at him.
An officer was standing a few feet away, watching.
Thomas and his friends went to the officer first. They asked him to do something. The officer shrugged.
So they confronted the man themselves. He would not hand the dog over. There was a scuffle. Thomas walked away with the puppy, and has had him ever since.
A necessary note, and it is not a small one: taking a dog from someone, even someone who is hurting it, is a genuinely bad idea and can be dangerous and illegal. The right call is animal control, a rescue, or a police report you escalate. That the officer in this story did nothing is its own indictment, and it does not make the grab safe. It made it work exactly once.
The dog who came out of it
Here is the part that keeps surprising people, and it is where the stigma cracks.
A pit bull-type puppy, abused in public, taken in a fight, should by every stereotype be a damaged animal. Chef is timid, gentle, and has shown zero aggression. He is good with other dogs. He is good with kids. He followed Thomas back to his studio that day and would not leave his side, and he has been at his side ever since, supervising household chores like he is co-signing them.
Thomas grew up with dogs, Rottweilers and pit bulls, and says he still was not prepared for this. Chef learned cues almost immediately. He is, in his person’s estimation, extremely smart, and that intelligence has been monetized in the most 2020s way possible: the tricks helped push Thomas past 100,000 followers on TikTok.
He is now, plausibly, the more famous of the two. Thomas describes being recognized in a breakfast burrito line as “the guy with the dog,” which he says he genuinely loves, precisely because of where the dog came from. A dog who was dangled by a leash on a street corner is now a dog people are delighted to see. That is not nothing.
The A&R with four legs
Chef is in the studio. Thomas has said his name made it into an unreleased song, but the more consistent role is quieter: Chef sits with him while he makes a beat, listens to finished tracks, and functions, in Thomas’s telling, as an A&R man, delivering a verdict on whether it is good.
He is also, apparently, an aware camera subject. He knows when he is being filmed and perks up for it, which makes him a professional. He and Thomas have modeled for the pet accessories brand Merci Collective, and his limitation on set is not nerves but stamina: he does not like being on his feet too long before he gets lazy about it.
There is one TikTok Thomas points to as proof of the dog’s comedic instincts, in which Chef, filmed first thing in the morning, uses his paws to drag the covers over his own head. Nobody taught him that.
The farm years
Before Los Angeles, there was a farm. Two of them, owned by a friend in Northern California, where Thomas went right before the pandemic and stayed for seven or eight months a year across two years: him, Chef, a few friends, and around ten other dogs.
Chef ran in the trees, got filthy, chased deer. Thomas calls it the best move he could have made, and describes finding a new level in his own life through being outdoors.
There is a small, honest coda to that story, and it is the kind of detail most celebrity pet profiles leave out: when they moved back to the city, Chef gained weight. No more trees, no more running, no more jumping on things. So they adjusted his diet down to one full meal a day.
That is the actual, unglamorous consequence of moving a working-bodied dog from a farm to an apartment, and it is the same consequence that hits an enormous number of city dogs whose people never notice.
Beach outings continue. Chef sprints toward the ocean like he loves it and then sprints back the moment a wave arrives, wanting nothing to do with being wet. He digs his nose into the sand and eats some of it, which his owner hates. The pool remains untested.
What the dog is actually for
Thomas is direct about what Chef has done for him, and it is not a metaphor. Through illness, through being in a financial bind, through the ordinary grinding uncertainty of a creative career, the dog has been the thing that made it bearable. He calls him an aid.
And he is direct about the second job Chef does, which is public and deliberate. There is a stigma attached to pit bull-type dogs that they are aggressive, mean, unfit for a home. Thomas has spent years putting a timid, joyful, cover-pulling, deer-chasing, camera-loving dog in front of an audience specifically to argue otherwise: that they are among the sweetest and most loving dogs a person can have.
He is not making that argument with a statistic. He is making it with a dog who was taken off a street corner by force, and who turned out fine.
