Head Chef Resume 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 resume 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 room and a chef from a 300-cover brasserie are not interchangeable. State covers, seats and check average so the reader can place you in seconds.
• Food cost and labor 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.
• Health inspections and food safety. A score, a streak of clean visits or a passed third-party audit answers the risk question before it is asked.
• Whether your cooks 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 resume has none of those, it reads like a line cook's resume with a bigger title on top, and I move on.”

Use a summary if you have run a kitchen or been a sous chef. Use an 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 resumes 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, labor cost percentage, purchasing and vendor negotiation, par levels, inventory counts, waste logs, forecasting covers, banquet event orders.
• Safety and compliance: HACCP plans, temperature and cooling logs, allergen and cross-contact procedure, county health inspection prep, chemical storage, knife and burn safety training.
• People: scheduling to a labor target, station training, line-check discipline, discipline and documentation, interviewing cooks, working with front of house on ticket times.
• Systems: Toast, Square or Aloha POS; MarketMan, Craftable or Restaurant365 for inventory and invoices; 7shifts or HotSchedules for scheduling; Google Sheets or Excel for costing.

Name the cuisines you can actually run a station in. "Italian, modern American, wood-fired" is useful. "International cuisine" is not, and an executive chef will test it in the working interview.

Only two things are near-universal in the US: a food protection manager certification and, in many counties, a food handler card for everyone on the line. Everything else is a bonus that signals you take the trade seriously.

• ServSafe Food Protection Manager: the one most employers name. An ANSI-accredited manager certification is required by many state and local codes for at least one person in charge. List the expiry year.
• ServSafe Allergens and ServSafe Alcohol: quick add-ons. Allergens matters more every year; alcohol training matters if you supervise a bar-adjacent kitchen.
• American Culinary Federation certifications: Certified Sous Chef (CSC), Certified Chef de Cuisine (CCC), Certified Executive Chef (CEC). These carry real weight with hotel and club employers and mean less at a small independent.
• Food handler card: county or state issued and often required within 30 days of hire. Say which state or county issued yours.
• First Aid, CPR and AED: worth listing, cheap to hold, and some employers require one certified person per shift.
• HACCP training: expected if you do sous vide, curing, canning or any process that needs a variance from your health department.

Culinary school goes below your experience once you have five years of kitchens. One line: degree or diploma, school, year. Stages and externships at named restaurants can go under education if they were serious; a two-day stage is not a credential. Rules vary by state and county, so check your local health department for what your city requires before you promise it 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. Vacation cover, a leadership gap, a chef out 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 vendor count. That is the part most sous chefs never get to touch.
3. 3Show one menu you wrote and costed, even a special-of-the-week program or a brunch menu, with the food cost it ran at.
4. 4Show one person you developed. A prep cook you moved to the line is proof you can build a brigade.
5. 5Add labor cost if you built the schedule. "Scheduled 22 cooks to a 14% labor target" answers the question a first-time-head-chef interview always asks.

One page up to about eight years of experience, two pages for an executive chef with multiple outlets. Reverse chronological order. No photo and no date of birth in the US, whatever the format looked like when you trained abroad. In the UK the same document is called a head chef CV and photos are equally unwelcome there.

• Mirror the posting's own words: covers, brigade, à la carte, banquet, BOH, food cost, labor cost, par levels, HACCP, ServSafe, scratch kitchen, 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, immersion circulator. Postings frequently ask for these by name.
• Save as a PDF named FirstName-LastName-Head-Chef.pdf. Chefs get emailed resumes named resume-final-2.pdf every week.

If you have worked six kitchens in three years, group the short stints under one heading such as "Line cook roles, 2019 to 2022, 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.