Three real chef resumes, one per career stage, each with the templates that actually suit it and why.
Recommended for chefs at this stage
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Cover counts, revenue, food cost percentage and team size tell a hiring chef or owner more in one line than a paragraph of cuisine adjectives. "Ran a 150-seat kitchen doing 200 covers a night" says something specific and verifiable; "passionate about creating memorable dining experiences" does not.
Sauté, grill, garde manger, pastry: name the exact stations you have run. Pair that with cuisine type and typical volume, since a kitchen hiring for a fast-paced 300-cover night wants to know you have actually worked that pace, not just that you can cook well in general.
Once you are past line cook, food cost percentage, labor cost management and vendor negotiation are what separate a cook from someone who can run a kitchen as a business. List ServSafe Manager, HACCP or an ACF certification explicitly, since these are often required before an owner will even consider a sous or executive chef candidate.
Restaurants close, ownership changes, and kitchens go through leadership turnover often. List the role and dates plainly rather than leaving a gap; a hiring chef in this industry has seen it many times and cares more about what you did in the role than how long the restaurant itself lasted.
One page for a line cook or early-career cook. Two pages becomes reasonable once you are a sous chef or above with real cost, revenue and team-size numbers, or a menu development history long enough that cutting it would lose real detail a hiring chef needs.
Name a signature dish or two only if it ties to a real outcome, like a dish that drove a notable increase in orders or drew press coverage. A long list of dishes reads as a menu, not a resume; what a hiring chef wants to know is what you can build and run, not every plate you have ever cooked.
List each role with dates and what you actually did there rather than trying to smooth it over. Moving between kitchens is normal in this industry and is not read the way job-hopping is read in other fields; what matters is a clear pattern of growth in responsibility from one role to the next.
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