Chef resume tips
A chef resume should say what kind of kitchen and what you were responsible for on the board. A tasting-menu line, a hotel banquet kitchen, a cafeteria, and a neighborhood dinner service do not read the same. The title chef is used loosely. Your station or your menu makes it precise.
What to put first
Name the style of service and your scope: a station, a pastry program, a banquet book, or the whole line if you truly ran it. Say whether you wrote the menu, ordered, and scheduled, or cooked a station someone else planned.
The service
Describe the meal period and the style. Brunch volume and a coursed dinner are different evidence. You do not need a cover count. The kind of service is the fact.
What you controlled
Menu, ordering, scheduling, and the pass are separate levers. Claim the ones you had. A sous chef and an executive chef should not swap summaries.
Food you can stand behind
Mention the cuisine or the program honestly. Do not claim a butcher program or a pastry program you never ran. Allergies and dietary work belong only if they were part of your board.
An example line
Adapt this only where it is true for you. It is a shape for a bullet, not a claim that a particular person did this work.
Sous chef for a neighborhood dinner service: wrote the nightly specials, ordered produce, and ran the pass on Fridays and Saturdays.
What to leave off
Leave off a celebrity kitchen you staged in for a week written as employment, health-score claims you cannot source, and a personality pitch in place of the station. Leave off recipes that are not yours to give away if they are the restaurant's.
Questions
- Should I include a menu?
- A short list of dishes you were responsible for can help if you are allowed to share them. A full proprietary recipe does not belong on a resume.
- What if I was a cook applying for a chef title?
- Use the title you had and describe any menu or ordering duty you already held. Do not retitle yourself.