If you go to a Francophone country and ask for the chef or a Spanish-speaking country and ask for el jefe, the chief of the business or restaurant will respond (one would hope without a cleaver).
When I lived in French-speaking West Africa, I would address any gendarme as chef. He would usually crack a smile, as I had also planted the notion that I was not a tourist. It took a year of speaking French before I realized that the chef in a restaurant was the chief of the restaurant, and that chief had a broad applicability.
As I was building a house, I would visit every day during construction. The phrase that I learned to request the foreman was el jefe. Here is the same word in Spanish.
If you asked for the chief you would probably get the right person, although in the English-speaking world this might sound out-of-place. If you asked for the chef, you would probably get the right person in a restaurant, but a puzzled look if the hearer were not a fan of Hell's Kitchen.
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