Line Cook Resume 2026 - stations, covers and ticket times on one page free

Three or four lines: years on a line, the stations you can hold alone, the kitchen type and cuisine, covers per service, and your food safety certification. A chef reads this to answer one question - can this person take saute on Friday - so write it to answer that question.

Coming from prep, catering, a school kitchen or the military, write the same paragraph from volume and consistency: how many portions you produced, to what spec, on what schedule. Kitchens respect anyone who has produced food at scale on a deadline; they do not respect a page that hides where the volume came from.

Stations, technique, the discipline that holds a service together, and the food safety credential that keeps the kitchen open. Everything here is testable in a stage shift.

Formula: kitchen type and cuisine plus station plus covers plus what you owned. Not 'prepared food according to recipes', but which station, how many covers, at what ticket time, and what improved because you were there.

Describe the kitchen so a chef in another city can price it: seats, cuisine, service style, and whether food was made from scratch or assembled. '140 seats, scratch kitchen, stocks and sauces in house' says far more about your training than the restaurant's name ever will.

Culinary school helps and is not required; plenty of sous chefs never went. What is close to universal is food safety certification. A food handler card is required in many states before a first shift, and any kitchen needs at least one certified food protection manager on site, which is what ServSafe Food Protection Manager covers. Holding the manager-level certification as a line cook is a genuine advantage, because it is part of the promotion to sous chef.

• ServSafe Food Protection Manager certification, with the date - the manager-level credential
• ServSafe Food Handler or your state food handler card where required
• Allergen training, and HACCP training if a previous kitchen ran a plan
• Culinary degree or diploma, with the school, program and graduation year
• Apprenticeship or American Culinary Federation certification such as Certified Culinarian if you hold one
• Stages: name the restaurant, the length and the station, because chefs read those closely
• High school diploma or GED if you have no culinary schooling

Kitchens hire from zero more readily than almost any other trade, but they hire you into prep and dish first, not onto saute. That is not a demotion, it is the actual route: prep teaches you the walk-in, the par levels, the yields and the knife work, and most line openings are filled from the prep station before they are ever advertised.

Write the resume for that entry. Lead with the food handler card you already hold, then any work that involved production volume and a deadline - catering, a school or hospital kitchen, a deli counter, military food service - with portions and timings attached. Ask for a stage, a short unpaid trial shift, because chefs decide from how you set up a board far faster than from a page.

• Food handler card already in hand, with the date
• Any volume food production written in portions per day and the deadline you hit
• Knife work and technique you can demonstrate, described honestly
• Physical reliability: standing shifts, doubles, weekends and holidays available
• A stage requested directly in the cover note - most chefs will say yes