Head Chef CV Examples & Writing Guide

This is a fictional person, but every line is the kind of thing an owner or general manager actually reads. Notice how the kitchen is described by size and style before any duty is listed, and how each job carries at least one number.

Restaurant hiring is fast and personal. The person reading your CV is usually the owner, the GM or the executive chef above the role, and they are reading between services. Four things decide whether you get a call.

• Volume and style match. A chef from a 60-seat tasting menu restaurant and a chef from a 300-cover brasserie are not interchangeable. State covers, seats and average spend so the reader can place you in seconds.
• Food cost and labour cost. Two percentage points on food cost is real money. If you moved either number, that belongs in the first bullet of the job where you moved it.
• Food hygiene rating and food safety. A 5 rating held across inspections or a passed third-party audit answers the risk question before it is asked.
• Whether your chefs stay. Turnover is the industry's biggest cost. A turnover figure, a promotion you made, or a training plan you built is worth more than any adjective about leadership.

“I skim for three numbers: covers, food cost and how long the sous chefs stayed. If a head chef CV has none of those, it reads like a chef de partie's CV with a bigger title on top, and I move on.”

Use a personal statement if you have run a kitchen or been a sous chef. Use a career objective only if you are stepping up into your first head chef job and need to say so directly. Either way, keep it to three or four lines and put a number in it.

Most chef CVs list the job description. The reader already knows what a head chef does. Rewrite each duty as something that happened, with the number attached.

Split the list. Cooking craft, kitchen business, and the software the job actually uses. Ten to fourteen items is plenty; a list of thirty reads as filler.

• Craft: menu development, plate costing, butchery and fabrication, stocks and mother sauces, pastry basics, sous vide, fermentation or preservation if you really do it, plating and photography for the menu.
• Kitchen business: food cost percentage, labour cost percentage, purchasing and supplier negotiation, par levels, stock takes, waste logs, forecasting covers, banqueting function sheets.
• Safety and compliance: HACCP plans or Safer Food, Better Business, temperature and cooling records, the 14 allergens and Natasha's Law labelling, preparing for food hygiene inspections, COSHH chemical storage, knife and burn safety training.
• People: rotas to a labour target, section training, line-check discipline, disciplinary procedure and documentation, interviewing chefs, working with front of house on ticket times.
• Systems: Toast, Lightspeed or Square EPOS; Procure Wizard or Apicbase for stock and invoices; Fourth or Planday for rotas; Google Sheets or Excel for costing.

Name the cuisines you can actually run a section in. "Italian, modern British, wood-fired" is useful. "International cuisine" is not, and an executive chef will test it at the trial shift.

Only one thing is close to universal in UK kitchens: a food safety certificate at the right level for the job, which for a head chef means Level 3. Everything else is a bonus that signals you take the trade seriously.

• Level 3 Award in Supervising Food Safety in Catering: the one most employers name for head and sous chefs. UK law does not set an expiry, but many employers expect a refresher every three years or so. List the year you took it.
• Allergen and alcohol add-ons: a Level 3 allergen management award matters more every year since Natasha's Law brought in full ingredient labelling for food prepacked for direct sale (PPDS). A personal licence matters if you run the kitchen in a pub or alongside a bar.
• Professional bodies and competitions: membership of the Craft Guild of Chefs, or a placing in a recognised culinary competition. These carry real weight with hotel and contract catering employers and mean less at a small independent.
• Level 2 Food Hygiene and Safety: the baseline for everyone in the kitchen. A head chef rarely needs to list their own, but saying you keep the brigade's certificates current is a useful line.
• Emergency First Aid at Work: worth listing, cheap to hold, and many employers want a trained first aider on every shift.
• HACCP training: expected if you do sous vide, curing, fermenting or vacuum packing, where the environmental health officer will want to see the hazard analysis behind the process.

Catering college goes below your experience once you have five years of kitchens. One line: qualification, college, year. Stages at named restaurants can go under education if they were serious; a two-day stage is not a qualification. Rules on specialist processes are enforced by your local authority, so check with its environmental health team before you promise anything in an interview.

The gap between sous and head is the business side: money, people and the menu. Show that you already touched all three, even if the title did not say so.

1. 1Count every week you covered the chef. Holiday cover, a leadership gap, a chef off sick: "acting head chef for 11 weeks in 2024" is a real credential and belongs in the bullet.
2. 2Claim the ordering. If you placed the orders, name the budget and the supplier count. That is the part most sous chefs never get to touch.
3. 3Show one menu you wrote and costed, even a specials board or a brunch menu, with the food cost it ran at.
4. 4Show one person you developed. A commis chef you moved up to chef de partie is proof you can build a brigade.
5. 5Add labour cost if you built the rota. "Built rotas for 22 chefs to a 14% labour target" answers the question a first-time head chef interview always asks.

Two pages is the UK norm for a head chef, and one page is fine up to about eight years of experience. Reverse chronological order. No photo and no date of birth on a UK CV, whatever the format looked like where you trained. In the US the same document is called a resume, and photos are equally unwelcome there.

• Mirror the advert's own words: covers, brigade, à la carte, banqueting, BOH, food cost, labour cost, par levels, HACCP, Level 3 Food Safety, fresh food, cooked from scratch, seasonal menu, line checks.
• Group and chain restaurants use applicant tracking systems, so keep one column, standard headings, and no tables or graphics. Independents often read a PDF by hand, but the same clean file works for both.
• Put certifications in their own block near the top or immediately under education, not scattered through bullets.
• List cuisine types and equipment you have run: wood-fired oven, combi oven, plancha, smoker, sous vide water bath. Adverts frequently ask for these by name.
• Save as a PDF named FirstName-LastName-Head-Chef.pdf. Chefs get emailed CVs named cv-final-2.pdf every week.

If you have worked six kitchens in three years, group the short stints under one heading such as "Chef de partie roles, 2016 to 2018, three seasonal restaurants" and explain in a half line. Seasonal work is normal in this trade and does not need an apology, but a wall of three-month jobs with no context makes the reader stop.