Best Chef CV Examples & Tips to Use in 2025

The best CV for a chef position will show off your cooking talents, and highlight your experience and your ability to collaborate with others and satisfy customers. Remember, your skills are what keep the restaurant afloat, so it’s important that you have the right culinary abilities to attract customers. Additionally, a hiring manager typically wants to know that you’ll stay with the restaurant for quite some time, as hiring a new chef can be very expensive

The structure of your CV will partially depend on the CV format that you choose. There are three major CV formats: the chronological CV, which emphasises work history, the functional CV, which emphasises skills, and the hybrid CV, which emphasises both. Regardless of which format you’ve selected, you will typically include the following sections:

 

 

Your contact information is where you include your full name, phone number, email address, and LinkedIn profile. When you use CV templates, you typically just have to add your information.

 

 

Next is your CV professional summary orcareer objective for CV. This is a paragraph at the top of your CV that includes two to three sentences about your best skills and key achievements. In a professional CV, a summary helps recruiters get an understanding of who you are at a glance.

 

 

If you have any work experience, you should include it in your experience section. Oftentimes, chefs will include any experience they have in their work history section. Here are a few job titles you might be able to include:  

• Kitchen staff
• Sous chef
• Executive chef
• Head chef
• Fine dining
• Line cook
• Pastry chef
• Professional chef

Remember that you should only include the last 10 years of work experience. For experience beyond 10 years, you can refer hiring managers to your LinkedIn profile.

 

 

Your skills section is also extremely important. Here are a few chef-related key skills for CV that you might be able to use to fill out your skills section:

• Food preparation
• Food safety
• Food cost and pricing
• Food quality
• Dietary restrictions and allergy preparation
• Menu development
• Maintaining quality standards
• Time management

You’ll notice that this list is a mix of both hard skills and soft skills. Feature these skills throughout your CV to prove that you’re a well-balanced candidate.

 

 

Not every person working as a chef has been to culinary school. However, the culinary arts are incredibly important to chefs, and if you have such credentials, you should include it in your CV. If you don’t have any expert experience, you can just list your GCSE.

Do:

• Include in your key achievements any staff members you’ve mentored in the past. Chef positions are often very managerial, and it’s a good idea to mention your involvement in mentoring.
• Mention the type of cuisine you specialise in when applicable. If you’re applying to an Italian restaurant, you can mention that you worked previously at Italian restaurants.
• Proofread your CV. A typo can immediately put recruiters off your CV without even reading it.

Don’t:

• Discuss specific food items you’ve cooked at other restaurants. Generally this isn’t relevant and you don’t need to mention it.
• Apply for jobs that you’re unqualified for. Read the job description and see whether you’re qualified for a job before you apply.
• Only cite cooking-related skills in your skills section. Menu creation, or staff management, for example, is just as big of a part of the job as cooking.