Sous Chef resume examples by experience level

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Use this example

A sous chef resume is a one to two page document proving one thing above all others: that the kitchen keeps running on the days the chef is not in the building.

That is the whole job. A sous chef is not a senior cook with a better title, and it is not a chef with less experience. It is the person who holds delegated authority: someone else's name is on the operation, and yours is on the decisions made while they are off. A chef reading your file is asking one question, which is whether handing you the keys and the order guide means having to check behind you. Write the answer down as the things you actually owned alone.

Resume guide for a sous chef resume

This guide and the corresponding sous chef resume example will cover:

• How to write a sous chef resume, section by section
• Why delegated ownership, not cooking ability, is what the page has to prove
• Three adaptable summaries: junior sous, sous chef and executive sous chef
• What the American Culinary Federation Certified Sous Chef credential requires
• What the job market looks like and what you can expect to earn

How to write a sous chef resume

Six sections: contact header, summary, what you owned alone, kitchen experience, certifications and education, and skills. One page for a first sous role, two once you have covered a chef for a full season.

The block naming what you held without supervision goes high, because it is the only part of the file that distinguishes you from the best cook on the line.

Run the finished file through the ATS resume checker before you send it. Groups and hotel operators route applications through a parser first.

Choosing the best resume format for a sous chef resume

Reverse chronological. One page until you have covered a chef through a full trading year, two once you have opened a kitchen or carried a brigade into double figures.

A functional or skills-first format fails badly here. The reader is tracking a progression: cook, then lead or chef de partie, then junior sous, then sous. A format that hides dates reads as a climb with a gap in it.

Keep the venue type in each role header. A sous chef in a 240 seat brasserie doing 900 covers a weekend and a sous chef in a 30 seat tasting menu room are both sous chefs, and neither can do the other's job on day one.

Include your contact information

Put the food safety certificate and its expiry on the page. Where the chef is the only other certified manager on site, a sous chef holding their own certificate can be left in charge, which is a scheduling fact rather than a decoration.

Make use of a summary

Four lines: your level and the kind of kitchen, years supervising, what you owned alone, and one number showing scale.

Junior sous chef promoted off the line after three years, running a 68 seat neighbourhood kitchen on the chef's two days off and every Sunday service. Write the daily prep list for four cooks, place the produce and dairy orders against a fixed order guide, and receive and check every delivery Monday through Wednesday. Hold a current ServSafe Food Protection Manager certificate and 26 months of documented shift supervision toward ACF Certified Sous Chef.

Sous chef in a 180 seat restaurant running 900 to 1,100 covers a week, second to the chef and in sole charge for two services a week plus holiday cover. Own the order guide across 11 suppliers, the weekly prep list, the kitchen rota for 14 cooks and the monthly inventory count. Trained six cooks from trial shift to independent station in two years, four of whom are still in the building. ACF Certified Sous Chef since 2023.

Executive sous chef in a 240 seat restaurant with a 22 person brigade, holding the kitchen through a chef transition and 14 weeks without a head chef in post. Own ordering, receiving, the rota, the training plan and the inventory count, and run the pass for five of seven services. Rebuilt the training record so every cook signs off on station standards before working it alone, which took the reopen-a-station-from-cold failure rate to zero across two summers. ACF Certified Sous Chef, renewed 2028.

Right vs wrong: the same sous chef summary, twice

The word doing the work in the right column is "own". A chef hiring a second in command needs nouns with your name attached, because the point of the post is that some things stop being the chef's problem.

Outline your kitchen experience

Venue, city, seat count or covers, brigade size, and dates. Then three to five bullets, each naming something you held rather than something you helped with.

Sous Chef, Ninebark Kitchen, Portland, OR, 180 seats, 14 cooks, April 2022 to Present
Second to the chef and in sole charge of the kitchen for two services a week, every chef holiday and the full 14 week gap between head chefs in 2025.
Own the order guide across 11 suppliers: place the orders, receive and check every delivery Monday to Wednesday, and raise credits on short or out-of-spec product.
Write the daily prep list for the whole kitchen and correct it weekly against actual usage; prep overrun on the two highest volume items fell from a routine half case a week to almost nothing.
Write the weekly rota for 14 cooks against the covers forecast and hold it inside the hours the chef sets, including the December trading peak.
Run the monthly inventory count with the chef and reconcile it against deliveries and waste logs.
Trained six cooks from trial shift to independent station in two years, each signed off against a written station standard before working it alone.

Put the venue's size in the header line so every number below has a scale attached, and write the verb you actually did: placed, wrote, received, signed off, reconciled. Chefs read "assisted" and "helped" as softening a claim.

The sous chef runs the kitchen when the chef is not there: write what you owned alone

This is the section that decides a sous chef hire, and almost no application contains it.

Every candidate can cook; that is the entry condition, not the argument. What a chef cannot work out from a job title is which parts of the operation actually left their desk when the last sous chef was appointed. So write it out: six things you held without anyone checking behind you.

Ordering and receiving: Place orders against a fixed order guide across 11 suppliers, receive and check every delivery Monday to Wednesday, reject out-of-spec product and raise the credit. Chef sees the invoices at the weekly meeting, not before.
The prep list: Write the daily prep list for the whole kitchen, four to six cooks depending on the day, and correct it weekly against actual usage rather than last month's guess.
The rota: Write the weekly schedule for 14 cooks against the covers forecast the chef sets, and hold it inside the hours agreed, including the December peak and two festival weekends.
Training and correction: Take new cooks from trial shift to independent station against a written station standard, and give the correction on the spot when a standard slips, rather than saving it for the chef.
Service without the chef: Run the pass for two of seven services a week, all chef holiday, and the 14 week gap between head chefs in 2025.
The count: Run the monthly inventory count and reconcile it against deliveries and waste before it goes to the office.

Three rules make that block honest and useful.

Name what you owned, not what you were near. If the chef still places the meat order, say you place produce, dairy and dry goods. A reader who has done the job trusts the file more for the distinction, not less.

Give the frequency, because delegated authority is measured in how often. "Cover the chef occasionally" and "run the pass for two of seven services every week" describe different jobs, and only the second one is a sous chef.

Say what happened the last time the chef was genuinely gone: a long illness, a notice period, a resignation on a Friday. Holding a kitchen together for eleven weeks with no head chef in post is the strongest single line available in this occupation, and most people leave it off because it did not feel like an achievement at the time.

Build a snapshot of your key skills

Ten to fourteen entries, grouped so a chef can scan: what you run, what you cook, and the systems behind both.

Kitchen management: Order guide ownership, Goods receiving and credits, Rota writing to a covers forecast, Inventory counting and reconciliation, Prep list authoring, Station sign-off and training records
Production: Saute, grill and garde manger to senior standard, Butchery and fish fabrication, Stocks and sauces, Volume banqueting production, Allergen substitution under service pressure
Food safety: Kitchen food safety plan ownership, Cooling and holding logs, Date marking under Food Code section 3-501.17, Allergen control and the nine major allergens, Health inspection preparation
Systems: Inventory and ordering software, Point of sale ticket flow and kitchen display systems, Rota and labor scheduling software, Recipe and specification records

Keep the cooking group short. A file listing thirty techniques reads like a cook's resume with a promotion in the header.

List your education and certifications

Certifications first, because two of them gate the job, then culinary training.

ACF Certified Sous Chef, American Culinary Federation, #CSC-208841, certified 2023, renewal due 2028
ServSafe Food Protection Manager, National Restaurant Association, 2024, current to 2029
Oregon Food Handler Card, Oregon Health Authority, current
Associate of Applied Science, Culinary Arts, Oregon Coast Culinary Institute, Coos Bay, OR, 2017
Coursework toward certification: 30 hour nutrition course, 30 hour food safety and sanitation course, 30 hour supervisory management course, all completed 2022 and 2023

The Certified Sous Chef designation is worth understanding before you write it, because the requirements say something about the job.

The American Culinary Federation requires two years supervising a shift or food station within the past ten years, plus one education route from a list: a high school diploma or GED with five years of entry-level culinary experience, 150 continuing education hours with five years, an ACFEF culinary arts program certificate with four years, an associate's degree in culinary arts with three years, or the ACFEF apprenticeship program with 4,000 hours of on-the-job training. Three 30 hour courses are mandatory, in nutrition, in food safety and sanitation, and in supervisory management, with an eight hour refresher required where a course is more than five years old. There are written and practical exams, and the certification must be renewed every five years (American Culinary Federation, CSC level requirements, retrieved 16 September 2026).

Notice the supervisory management course sitting alongside nutrition and sanitation. The credential treats managing people as a technical subject on the same footing as food safety, which is exactly the shift your resume has to show.

If you are not certified, the coursework and the supervisory months are still worth listing. "26 months of documented shift supervision, 30 hour supervisory management course completed, sitting the CSC practical in spring" tells a chef where you are and that you are deliberate about it.

Choose the right layout and design

Single column, 11 or 12 point, clear headings, no photograph, no skill rating bars. Groups and hotel operators parse applications before a human opens them, and multi-column templates scramble in the parse.

Sous chef job market and outlook

Sous chefs sit inside the Bureau of Labor Statistics category for chefs and head cooks: a small, fast-growing occupation with a high experience bar.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Chefs and Head Cooks, 2025-35 projections and May 2025 wage data, last modified 27 August 2026.

Where chefs and head cooks work:

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025.

What salary you can expect as a sous chef

The median annual wage for chefs and head cooks was $62,470, or $30.03 an hour, as of May 2025 (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, last modified 27 August 2026). A sous chef sits below the head chef in the same kitchen, so read that median as the middle of a band rather than a number to expect on appointment.

The larger decision the data points to is sector. Traveler accommodation pays a median of $74,380 against $60,580 in food services and drinking places, a gap of $13,800 a year; amusement, gambling and recreation pays $72,830. Restaurant kitchens employ 64 percent of the occupation and sit at the bottom of that table.

The lines that move you across that gap are operational: banqueting volume, multiple services a day, forecasting against occupancy rather than reservations, and evidence you wrote a rota inside somebody's labor budget.

Key takeaways for a sous chef resume

1. Prove the kitchen runs without the chef, because that is what the post is for.
2. Give six things you owned alone: orders, receiving, the prep list, the rota, training and the count.
3. Write the frequency of your unsupervised services, not just that you cover.
4. Count supervisory months precisely; the ACF measure is two years supervising a shift or station.
5. Put venue size and brigade size in every role header so the numbers have scale.
6. Keep the cooking list short and the ownership list long.
7. Say what happened the last time the kitchen ran without a head chef in post.

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Pair it with a matching sous chef cover letter.