This chef CV template follows a sous chef who progressed through commis and chef de partie roles in fresh-food kitchens. The Word example combines cooking and service responsibilities with menu costings, stock control and support for junior chefs. The guide covers how to present experience at different kitchen levels, from a first commis application to a head chef post.
Filename: FreeCVDownload_Chef.docx
Content of this CV template
Luke Harrison
Sous Chef
Contact
Birmingham | 07700 900327 | [email protected]
Profile
- Sous chef with eleven years in fresh-food restaurants, progressing from commis chef to kitchen supervision.
- Experienced in modern British menus, meat and fish preparation, sauces and running the pass.
- Plan preparation around bookings, organise sections and coordinate service with the restaurant team.
- Support seasonal menu development, recipe costing, ordering and weekly stock checks.
- Maintain food-safety records and allergen information; coach junior chefs in kitchen routines.
- City & Guilds Level 2 NVQ in Professional Cookery, with Level 3 food-safety training.
Work history
Sous Chef
The Bramble Room, Birmingham | May 2022 – Present
Deputise for the head chef in a seven-person kitchen serving a 70-seat restaurant, with around 120 covers on a busy Saturday evening.
- Run the pass on the head chef’s days off, coordinating five colleagues and timing dishes with front of house.
- Plan daily preparation from bookings and stock; check deliveries and place produce orders within agreed limits.
- Revised batch preparation and waste recording with section chefs; average avoidable prep waste fell from £165 to £130 a week over a 12-week review.
- Costed and trialled six seasonal dishes adopted for the spring 2026 menu, meeting the head chef’s 70% food gross-profit target.
- Maintain recipe and allergen records, check temperature logs and brief the kitchen and restaurant teams on menu changes.
- Trained two commis chefs to cover the larder section independently and prepared practical induction checklists for new starters.
Chef de Partie
The Copper Finch, Birmingham | April 2018 – April 2022
Ran larder and then sauce sections in a 60-seat neighbourhood restaurant serving seasonal menus.
- Organised mise en place and cooked to agreed recipes, portion sizes and presentation standards during lunch and dinner service.
- Supported private dining for up to 40 guests, coordinating preparation and service timings with the sous chef.
- Contributed weekly specials and recorded ingredient quantities for recipe costings.
- Checked section stock, labelled prepared food and coached one commis chef through preparation and closing routines.
Commis Chef
The Copper Finch, Birmingham | August 2015 – March 2018
Joined the kitchen while completing a work-based professional cookery qualification.
- Prepared vegetables, stocks, soups and cold starters under senior-chef supervision.
- Completed receiving, storage and cleaning checks and supported service across two sections.
Qualifications and training
City & Guilds Level 2 NVQ Diploma in Professional Cookery
University College Birmingham | 2017
Food safety and kitchen training
Level 3 Food Safety in Catering (2024); workplace allergen update (2026); kitchen supervision training (2025).
Hobbies and interests
I enjoy five-a-side football, cycling and seeing live music with friends.
How to write a chef CV
A chef CV should let the reader picture you in their kitchen. Your level in the brigade, the food you prepare, the pace of service and the responsibilities you take on are the starting point. A restaurant name and the words “worked well under pressure” leave too much of that picture missing.
Luke’s example shows progression from commis chef to chef de partie and sous chef. Cooking remains central, but his recent role also includes leading service, costing dishes, controlling waste and developing colleagues. Your CV should give the same clarity at your own level, whether you are entering a kitchen for the first time or applying to lead one.
Put your kitchen level and style of food near the top
Use the opening profile to identify your current level, relevant experience and strongest fit for the vacancy. A chef de partie might lead with running a section in a fresh-food restaurant. A breakfast chef could highlight early service, cooking to order and coordinating a buffet alongside individual requests. A pastry applicant should make their pastry experience visible immediately.
Describe the cuisine or food offering in terms that help an employer assess the match. “Modern British restaurant menus” is more useful than “a passion for all cuisines”. Where your experience spans several settings, choose the one most relevant to the role and let the employment history show the rest.
Your current job title and the next role you want can both be clear. An experienced chef de partie seeking a first sous chef post can emphasise deputising, supporting junior chefs, ordering and coordinating service. Those responsibilities provide the evidence for the step up.
Give each workplace enough context
Under the employer and dates, include a short description of the operation. Useful details include the type of venue, menu, brigade size, service pattern and typical cover volume. Select what helps someone understand your work rather than filling the entry with venue publicity.
Seats and covers describe different things. A 70-seat restaurant may serve 120 covers across a busy evening, as in Luke’s example. If you use a number, label the period and whether it is typical, peak or event-specific. For banqueting, the number of guests and style of service may explain the work better than restaurant capacity.
Kitchen titles also vary between employers. A sous chef in a small pub may have a different scope from a sous chef in a large hotel brigade. State the team you worked with and what you took responsibility for so the job title has a practical meaning.
A hotel entry can distinguish breakfast, restaurant, room service and banqueting work. A contract-catering entry might cover workplace lunches, hospitality and executive dining. If you worked in one part of a large venue, naming that operation makes your experience easier to assess.
Show what you can cook and what you can run
Connect technical skills to sections, dishes or services you have handled. Meat and fish preparation, sauces, pastry, bread, larder work or large-batch production may be relevant, but a long inventory of techniques tells the reader less than a few well-chosen examples of their use.
A section entry could say: “Ran the sauce section for lunch and dinner service, organising preparation and coordinating timings with larder and pastry.” An early-career example could describe preparing stocks, vegetables and cold starters under supervision, followed by the section responsibility gained as confidence developed.
Preparation is part of the evidence. Planning mise en place around bookings, adjusting quantities after a menu change and keeping a section ready through a busy service all demonstrate practical judgement. Explain the responsibility you held and how it supported consistency or service.
Equipment belongs on the CV where it is central to the work. A bakery or production kitchen may value experience with particular ovens, mixers or production equipment; a restaurant may care more about the sections you can cover. A tool list should support the application rather than crowd out your cooking experience.
Make food safety and allergen work concrete
Training is useful, but employers also want to understand your everyday responsibility. Relevant evidence includes completing or checking temperature records, maintaining recipe and allergen information, checking deliveries, managing stock rotation, briefing colleagues and contributing to kitchen audits.
Match the wording to your role. A commis chef might describe completing checks and following section procedures. A sous chef may have reviewed records, trained colleagues and followed up issues with the head chef. A head chef can explain responsibility for the kitchen’s food-safety system and inspection preparation.
For allergen experience, show the link between kitchen records and service communication. Luke’s CV combines recipe and allergen records with briefings for kitchen and restaurant teams when menus change. That describes useful responsibility without making the CV a food-safety manual.
If you mention an inspection result, give the venue, period and your contribution. Keeping records ready, coordinating corrective work or helping maintain standards provides context for the result. An inspection rating is a measure of the operation, so that context is more useful than placing the rating beside your name as a personal qualification.
Explain commercial responsibility at the right level
Costs become more prominent as you progress, but chefs at several levels contribute to the figures. A chef de partie may manage section stock and portions. A sous chef may cost dishes, place orders within agreed limits and review waste. A head chef may own food budgets, supplier decisions and labour planning.
Be specific about what you controlled. “Assisted with cost control” can become “Checked weekly section stock and adjusted preparation quantities with the sous chef”. If you managed ordering, explain the scope: a section, fresh produce, the whole kitchen or several outlets.
Use financial results with enough context to make them intelligible:
- For waste, identify the measure and period, such as the average weekly value of avoidable preparation waste.
- For food gross profit, distinguish a target used in recipe costing from a result achieved in trading.
- For a margin change, state the starting and ending figures and the period reviewed.
- For labour planning, describe the team or rota responsibility and the operational result.
Luke’s waste figure is a modest weekly change linked to a twelve-week review. His menu figure is an agreed food-GP target for costed dishes. They show different kinds of evidence. Neither needs to be presented as a claim about the restaurant’s overall profit.
Where the result came from a team change, make your contribution visible: you might have introduced a waste log, revised batch quantities, checked portion consistency or compared supplier prices. A clear action and its practical effect are useful even when you do not have access to the full management accounts.
Give menu work a clear purpose and outcome
“Developed menus” can cover anything from suggesting a weekly special to owning a complete seasonal change. Explain your part: proposing dishes, testing recipes, costing ingredients, writing specifications, preparing allergen information or training the brigade before launch.
Choose examples that suit the vacancy. Seasonal dishes and consistent execution may matter in a neighbourhood restaurant; pastry development may need detail about the products; a conference kitchen may value menus designed around service timings and guest requirements. In a care setting, menu work may involve resident preferences and nutrition, alongside collaboration with the wider team.
A useful outcome could be the number of dishes adopted, a smoother preparation process, a dish staying within its agreed cost or positive feedback that informed a later menu. Explain the basis of the result. A short account of a well-executed menu change can carry more weight than an unexplained claim to creativity.
Show leadership through service and development
For senior roles, describe the team you led and the decisions you made. Running the pass, allocating sections, planning cover, coordinating with front of house and responding to changes in bookings are different responsibilities. Select the ones that best show readiness for the advertised kitchen.
Training can produce strong CV evidence. State who you supported, what they learned and the responsibility they could take on afterwards. Luke helped two commis chefs become able to cover larder independently. A head chef might instead describe developing a chef de partie into a sous chef, improving induction or establishing consistent section handovers.
Communication should be attached to service. Briefing front of house on specials and allergens, agreeing event timings with a banqueting manager or coordinating a dietary request with the appropriate colleague gives “teamwork” a useful meaning. If you handle customer feedback or speak directly with clients, make that part of your remit clear.
Change the emphasis when you change kitchen setting
A restaurant CV can transfer into another setting, but the relevant experience needs to be easy to find. The change is often about which evidence you bring forward.
- Hotels and banqueting: show the outlets you covered, event sizes, preparation planning and coordination of timed service.
- Contract catering: emphasise consistent delivery to a client brief, menu cycles, hospitality requirements and budget or stock responsibility.
- Care homes: include experience of resident preferences, nutrition, relevant dietary requirements, audits and communication with care colleagues.
- Schools: make relevant meal-volume, service-window, dietary and menu-standard experience visible, along with any setting-specific training.
- Specialist pastry or bakery roles: give space to the products, production scale and specialist preparation that demonstrate the required craft.
You can explain transferable strengths positively. A chef moving from restaurants into care catering may have useful experience of fresh seasonal food, special requests, budgets and team supervision. The CV can lead with that evidence while showing the setting in which it was gained.
Present training and early experience in proportion
List your cookery qualification with its full title, awarding organisation, provider and year. NVQs, SVQs, diplomas and apprenticeships can be described precisely without a long course syllabus. For a qualification in progress, give the expected completion date and show the workplace experience alongside it.
Recent food-safety, allergen, supervisory or specialist kitchen training can sit in a short separate section. Include dates so the reader can distinguish recent development from initial training. Where a vacancy specifies a particular award or level, make the matching qualification easy to spot.
The government’s food-safety training guidance explains the distinction between suitable training and holding a particular certificate. The employer’s stated requirements remain the practical starting point for your application.
For a first commis application, use college restaurant work, placements, kitchen-assistant duties and practical assessments as evidence. Explain the food prepared, the service or production setting and what you learned to do reliably. An entry about helping prepare a college restaurant service is more informative than a profile built entirely around ambition.
As your experience grows, the balance shifts towards employment. Retain the qualifications that establish your foundation, then give the space to sections run, kitchens supported, menus delivered and colleagues developed. The Word CV template library offers other layouts if your application needs more room for specialist skills or a longer kitchen history.
Chef CV FAQs
A short separate portfolio can help for roles where presentation or specialist craft is important, particularly pastry, fine dining or development work. Choose a small selection with captions explaining the dish, setting and your contribution. A link keeps the main CV readable, while the employment entries still provide the evidence of service, consistency and kitchen responsibility.
Name the restaurant or outlet, the period you worked there and your role in its brigade. If the award is relevant to that period and operation, it can provide useful context. A hotel may have several kitchens, so identify the one in which you worked. Then describe your section and responsibilities; that is what helps the next employer assess your contribution.
Group work under the agency or a clearly labelled relief-chef entry with overall dates, then identify a few substantial or relevant assignments. Include kitchen level, venue type, service size and the sections covered. Label seasonal contracts so the pattern is easy to understand, and give longer appointments their own entries where they show progression.
A certificate is not a universal legal requirement for food handlers, although an employer can require a particular qualification. Appropriate skills, supervision and training remain essential. On the CV, show your actual food-safety training and practical responsibilities, and check the vacancy’s specific criteria. GOV.UK explains the distinction in its staff-training guidance.
Yes, when your experience supports that step. Bring forward occasions when you deputised, coordinated more than one section, helped with ordering or costings and developed junior chefs. Explain how often you took on those responsibilities and the size of the operation. This gives the employer evidence of readiness alongside your current title.
A brief line can be useful when the vacancy involves a practical assessment, live-in accommodation or a move to another area. State your notice period and any relevant relocation plans, then discuss the proposed trial’s timing and arrangements directly with the employer. Keep the CV’s main space for kitchen experience and qualifications.
