Pizza Chef CV Examples & Writing Guide

This sample is for a pizzaiolo with nine years in kitchens, now running the wood-fired oven and the dough programme at a neighbourhood restaurant after nearly three years in a high-volume New York-style pizzeria. Names and restaurants are invented. Put your own dough spec, oven and rush numbers in.

A pizza kitchen has one bottleneck and it is the oven. The person hiring wants to know whether you are the bottleneck or the person who clears it.

• Dough. Do you make it or does it arrive frozen? Hydration, preferment, ferment schedule, how many balls a day, how you adjust for a hot kitchen. This is the single biggest signal in the trade.
• Oven type and temperature. Wood-fired at 450 to 480°C for a 70-second bake is a completely different skill from a conveyor oven at 260°C. Say which one you run, at what temperature, and how you manage the fire or the deck.
• Volume under pressure. Pizzas per hour at peak, covers on a Saturday, slices out the door at lunch. Say what a rush looks like at your place, not just how many seats it has.
• Consistency. Portion weights, ticket times, waste percentage, food cost on the pizza category. Anyone can make one good pizza. Owners are buying 300 identical ones.
• Whether you can run people. Opening and closing, prep lists, ordering, training other chefs. A pizza chef who can build a second oven operator is worth more than a faster individual.

“Tell me your hydration, your ferment time and how many pizzas you push between seven and nine on a Saturday. That is the interview, on paper. When someone writes those three things down, I book a trial shift before I finish reading the page.”

Three sentences. Years on the station, dough and oven, rush volume, then one number about consistency or cost.

Be specific about styles and equipment. A pizzeria is hiring for their oven and their dough, not for pizza in general.

• Dough: baker's percentage, hydration control, poolish and biga preferments, direct dough, cold and room-temperature fermentation, bulk ferment and balling, reading dough by feel, gluten-free and par-baked bases
• Styles: Neapolitan, New York, Sicilian and grandma, Detroit pan, Roman al taglio, Chicago tavern thin, thin crust and pan varieties
• Ovens: wood-fired, gas deck, electric deck, rotating deck, conveyor. Include the temperature range in °C and the bake time you work at.
• Equipment: spiral mixer, planetary mixer, dough divider and rounder, sheeter, proofing cabinets, peels (metal and wood), infrared thermometer, dough press
• Prep: sauce from tinned whole tomatoes, cheese blends and portioning, cured meats, roasted vegetables, par-cooking toppings, mise en place discipline
• Kitchen operation: section opening and closing, prep lists, ordering and receiving, stock counts, food cost by category, waste tracking, working the pass with front of house
• Food safety: Level 2 or Level 3 food hygiene, temperature records, FIFO, the 14 allergens and cross-contact control, cleaning schedules, preparing for food hygiene inspections

• Level 3 Award in Supervising Food Safety in Catering: the usual supervisor-level food safety certificate in the UK. It is not a legal licence, but employers expect it from anyone running a section or a shift, and it is worth having if you want a lead or head pizzaiolo role.
• Level 2 Food Hygiene and Safety: what most kitchens ask every food handler to hold, often as a short online course. There is no fixed legal renewal period, but many employers ask for a refresher every three years or so.
• Allergen training covering the 14 allergens: increasingly asked for by restaurant groups, and Natasha's Law applies to any food you prepack for direct sale. A gluten-free pizza menu makes this more than a formality.
• Challenge 25 and responsible alcohol service training if you also work a bar or counter that serves beer and wine.
• Pizza-specific schooling worth naming: Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN) courses, Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli, or a manufacturer or flour-mill training programme. These carry real weight at a Neapolitan concept and none at a chain, so use them where they fit.
• Catering college or an apprenticeship, if you have it. It is not required in this trade and nobody will hold its absence against you.

List each with the year. If your Level 3 certificate is several years old, either book a refresher before applying or list it honestly with the year, because restaurant groups check certificates during onboarding.

Pizza kitchens hire people with no restaurant experience constantly, especially for prep, slice counters and delivery-heavy shops. Speed, cleanliness and turning up are the whole test.

1. 1Lead with availability. Evenings, weekends, Fridays and Saturdays. That is when pizza is sold, and it decides who gets called.
2. 2Get a Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate before you apply. It is usually a short online course and a small fee, and it puts you ahead of most applicants for an entry job.
3. 3Turn any fast, repetitive, hot or physical work into bullets: warehouse picking, landscaping, retail rush hours, pot wash, catering setup.
4. 4Say what you can already do with your hands: knife work, following a recipe exactly, keeping a workspace clean, working next to someone in a tight space.
5. 5Mention home baking honestly if it is real. "Makes sourdough and pizza dough at home weekly, cold ferments 48 hours" is a genuine signal of interest, not filler.
6. 6Ask for a trial shift in your cover letter. Most independent pizzerias hire off a shift, not off a CV, and offering to come in shows you know that.
7. 7Keep it to one page. Print two copies and hand them in between 3pm and 5pm, never during a rush.

• One page. Nobody in a kitchen reads two.
• Order: name and contact with availability, short personal statement with your dough and oven, experience, skills, certificates, education.
• UK conventions: no photo, no date of birth, town or city only. If you are using a template from a country where photos and personal details are normal, strip those fields out.
• Independents hire in person. Print it, hand it to the owner or kitchen manager mid-afternoon, and offer to do a trial shift. Chains and restaurant groups use online portals, so keep a plain single-column PDF for those.
• Mirror the advert's words: pizzaiolo, pizza chef, pizza cook, pizza maker, dough maker, oven chef. Restaurant groups search on those exact terms.
• Say what shifts you can work and whether you have transport for a close that ends after midnight. It matters more than any adjective on the page.
• Keep two references from kitchens, with phone numbers. Chefs call each other, and a real reference beats a paragraph of self-description.